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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE 



SOUTHERN EMPIRE 



WITH OTHER PAPERS 



BY 



OLIVER T. MORTON 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 



SEP 22 1892 



^K 



OFWASH»*S- 






Copyright, 1892, 
By OLIVER T. MORTON. 

A// rights reserved. 



/i~zL^/s 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge , Mass., U.S.A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company. 






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d 



V 






TO MY MOTHER. 



CONTENTS. 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 



The Conjecture 

Its Difficulties 

Presentment of the Federal Grand Jury 

The Golden Circle .... 

The Dream of Empire 

The Causes of the War as they are writ by its 

Makers 

The Slaveholders and the Constitution . 
The Free and Slave Systems briefly compared 
The Law governing the Economy of the South 
The Effect of Slavery upon the Slaves, Land, and 

Agriculture . 
The Planter needed New Soil 
But he also needed Slaves 
The Cotton Gin 
The Cruelties of Slavery . 



The Foreign Slave Trade . 
Governor Adams's Message 
Other Phases of the Movement 



PAGE 

I 

2 

3 

4 
4 

5 
6 
8 
9 

ID 
II 
12 

13 
13 
14 
15 
i6 



VI CONTENTS. 

Extent and Profits of Piratical Slaving . . .17 

International Slave Trade inevitable . . . 17 

The Two Objects of Southern Revolution . . 18 

Economics of Slavery further considered ... 18 

Sociology of Slavery 21 

Feudalism in the South . . . . . .21 

The " Mean-White " Population .... 23 

The Moral Aspect of Slavery 25 

The Politics of Slavery 26 

The Gulf of Mexico 27 

Florida 28 

Destruction of " Negro Fort " 29 

Cession of Florida 30 

The Second Seminole War 31 

The Balance of Power 32 

Texas 33 

Houston's War 35 

Recognition and Annexation of Texas ... 36 

Manifest Destiny 37 

Shdell's Mission 37 

Contemplated Spoliation and Annexation of Mexico 38 

Attitude of the Northern People .... 39 

Compromise of 1850 42 

Kansas- Nebraska Bill 43 

Benton's Outline of the Southern Empire . . 43 

Gadsden's Mission 44 

Cuba 46 

Stephen A. Douglas 47 

Lopez 48 



CONTENTS. 



Vll 



Order of the Lone Star 
Guanajuato .... 
Purpose of Southern Secession 
Crittenden Compromise . 
Thaddeus Stevens 
The Rebellion the Result of a Conspiracy 
Provincialism of the Southern People 
Their Misconception of the North . 
Impotency of the Central Government 
Bravery of the Southern People in War 
Disappearance of Republican Forms 
The Southern Empire . . . 
Its Military Character . . . 

Its Growth 

The Reopening of the Slave Trade . 
Why an Empire and not a Republic 
Disintegration and Reunion of the North 
Decline of the Southern Empire 
Loss of Northern Provinces 
Suppression of the Slave Trade 
Fall of the Southern Empire . 



48 
48 
51 
52 
53 
S3 
54 
55 

58 

59 
60 
60 
61 
61 
61 
62 
63 
64 
64 
65 



OXFORD. 

Introduction ^ 

Origin of the Town 7i 

The Castle 7i 

The Coming of the Monks 72 

Alfred not the Founder of the University . . -73 



Vlll 



CONTENTS. 



The Irish Missionaries 

The Church and Learning .... 

The Decline of Learning 

Charlemagne and Alfred 

Monastic Instruction 

Scotus Erigena and Gerbert .... 

The Twelfth Century 

Monastic Schools the Germ Cells of the Universities 

The Rise of the Halls 

The Universities as Literary Republics . 

The Term *' University " 

The University of Salernum .... 
Saracenic Influence in Europe .... 
Irnerius creates the University of Bologna 
Effect of the Revival of the Roman Law . 

Vacarius in Oxford 

Conflict between the Civil and the Common Law 

The "Nations" 

Migration of Students 

Two Nations in Oxford 

Rise of the German University System . 
Secession from Paris ..... 

Oxford becomes a University .... 
Three Secessions from Oxford .... 

St. Scholastica's Day 

The Town does Penance 

The Number of Students at Oxford. 
Chaucer's Portrait of an Oxford " Clerk " 
Turbulence of Student Life .... 



73 
74 
IS 
IS 
y6 

77 
77 
78 
78 
78 
79 
79 
8o 
8o 
8o 
8i 
8i 

82 

84 
84 
85 
^S 
SS 
86 
86 
86 

87 
88 
89 



CONTENTS. 


ix 


Advent of the Colleges 


. 89 


The University and the Colleges distinct . 


. 90 


Merton College 


. 90 


Balliol College 


• 91 


New College 


. 92 


Wood's List of Oxford Schoolmen . 


93 


Revival of the Theory of Universals 


. 94 


Roscellin and Anselm 


94 


William of Champeaux and Abelard 


. 94 


Hales and Grostete 


• 95 


Thomas Aquinas 


• 95 


Duns Scotus ....... 


96 


Ockham ends the Controversy of Universals . 


96 


Ockham the Forerunner of Wycliffe 


97 


Failure of the Scholastic System 


98 


Meagreness of Knowledge .... 


99 


Roger Bacon 


lOI 


Physical Attributes of Mediaeval Oxford . 


103 


Pestilence at Oxford 


104 


The Art of Medicine ..... 


105 


Wycliffe 


106 


Jesus College 


108 


The Beginnings of English Prose 


109 


Tyndale and Campanella 


no 


Colet, More, and Erasmus .... 


III 


Oxford in Advance of Wittenberg . 


113 


" Greeks and Trojans " at Oxford . . . . 


114 


Bruno visits Oxford 


115 


The Heliocentric Doctrine . . . n . 


116 



CONTENTS. 



Religious Persecution at Oxford 

Under Henry VIII. . 

Under Edward VI. . 

Under Mary .... 

Ridley, Latimer, and Cranmer . 

Bodleian Library ... 

Leicester's Work as Chancellor 

Amy Robsart .... 

Her Funeral . . . . 

Mistakes of Scott 

St. Mar^^ the Virgin's Church . 

Magdalen College 

Its Gardens .... 

Addison 

Vandalism of the Puritans 

King Charles in the Town 

Cromwell as Chancellor . 

Song of " The English Anacreon " 

University Decree of 1683 

James II. in Oxford . 

William Penn expelled from Christ 

Origin of Christ Church 

Its Bells . 

Expulsion of John Locke 

John Wesley at Oxford 

The Methodist Club . 

Whitefield . 

Wesley's Political Sermon 

His Epitaph 



Church 



116 
116 
117 
118 
118 
119 
119 
120 
120 
121 
122 
122 
122 
123 
123 
124 
124 
125 
128 
129 
130 
130 

131 
132 

^33 
133 
133 
134 
134 



CONTENTS. 






XI 


Berkeley and Butler 135 


Tractarianism 






135 


Gibbon expelled from Magdalen 






137 


Doctor Johnson of Pembroke . 






137 


Shelley and Landor expelled 






137 


The University of the Last Century 






138 


The Modern University . 






139 


Oxford and Cambridge . 






140 



SOME POPULAR OBJECTIONS TO CIVIL 
SERVICE REFORM. 



Do Revolutions go backwards ? 
Introduction of the Spoils System . 

Andrew Jackson 

Theory of the American Commonwealth . 
Madison's Theory of Removal. 

Political Brigandage 

The Reformers 

The Civil Service Law .... 

First Forty Years of the Republic . 
Feudal System in American Politics 
The Spoils System and the Slave System 
Doctrine of Civil Service Reform . 
The President and the Clerk . 
Anglophobia ...... 

The Spoils System imported from England 
Civil Service Reform in England 
Aristocracy 



145 
146 

147 
148 
148 
149 
150 
150 
151 
153 
154 
158 
163 

167 
168 
171 



Xll 



CONTENTS. 



Bureaucracy 

Insolence of Office .... 

The Professional Politician 

His Absolute Power. 

The Citizen as an Office-H older 

The Office-Holder in Politics . 

Competitive Examinations 

Their Educational Value . 

Their Influence upon Character 

Qualifications of the Office-Holder . 

Functions of the Commission . 

Impotency of Heads of Bureaus 

Jackson and the Four-Year Law 

Corruption of Jackson's Administration 

Deficits under Van Buren 

Rotation in Office .... 

Its Possibilities .... 

Business and Politics 

The Art of Administration in the United 

Incapacity of Municipal Government 

Presidential Appointments 

The Cabinet .... 

Rotation in the United States . 

View of the Founders of the Republ 

Change wrought by Custom 

Calhoun on the Four- Year Law 

Theory of John Stuart Mill 

Election of Postmasters . 

Responsibility Vital to Good Government 



States 



172 

172 

173 

174 

175 
177 
178 
180 
181 
182 

183 
184 
185 
186 
187 
187 
188 
189 
190 
190 
191 
192 

193 
194 
196 
197 
198 
199 



CONTENTS. 



XIU 



Weakness of the Four- Year Law 

The Act of 1820 

Later Legislation ..... 
Limited Application of the Pendleton Act 
The Four-Year Law should be repealed . 
Effects of Rotation summarized 



201 
202 
203 
204 
205 
206 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE, 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE.^ 



What would be the condition of the Western 
world to-day if Southern rebellion had become 
revolution ? is a question which may sometimes 
give us pause. 

Unfortunately, it is growing increasingly diffi- 
cult to answer it ; to realize the past, and there- 
by to imagine what would have been. The war 
has nearly lapsed from memory into tradition. 
Its triumphs and sufferings, its hopes and fears, 
are fast fading with distance, and soon will be 
wrapped in the mists of forgetfulness. The im- 
agination, dulled by time, fails longer to body 
forth the forms of averted perils, and the dread 
alternative, disunion, has almost lost its meaning. 
Yet it was once real enough, near enough. 

1 The economic and historic data contained in this essay are 
drawn from sources easily accessible, and will be readily identi- 
fied by the good readers of history. Marginal references are, 
therefore, omitted. 



2 THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 

In the downfall of the slave power a distinct 
civilization perished, with institutions and ideals 
alien to the age ; and " the next generation 
[says a recent biographer of Calhoun] will find 
it easier to form an adequate conception of the 
ancient Egyptians and Indians than of their 
own grandfathers." The historian with much 
to record concerns himself but little with a con- 
tingency which did not occur, and the probable 
future of the great slave federation barely re- 
ceives from him the empty compliment of a 
passing conjecture. The difficulties in the way 
of a philosophical forecast may be pleaded in 
extenuation, for they are great. But if there be 
a science of history based upon a study of uni- 
formities, if we may reason from cause to effect 
in human affairs, deducing the laws which gov- 
ern a certain state of society, and, per contra, 
deducing a civihzation from the continued oper- 
ation of certain laws, the social and economic 
conditions existing in the South before the war 
are a legitimate subject of investigation, and 
furnish a basis for rational speculation. What 
is, we know ; what was to have been, let us 
consider. 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 3 

During the May term, 1862, the Federal 
grand jury for the District of Indiana returned 
nearly two hundred indictments of persons be- 
longing to a certain treasonable organization, 
known as the Knights of the Golden Circle, — a 
society formed to discourage enlistments in the 
Union armies, and otherwise to give aid and com- 
fort to the States then in rebellion. At the 
conclusion of its labors, the grand jury made a 
presentment to the court, which contained the 
following paragraph : — 

" From the evidence introduced before said 
grand jury, it would seem that the Order called the 
Knights of the Golden Circle had its origin in some 
of the Southern States, and was introduced into this 
State from Kentucky. Its primary object, when it 
originated, was to organize the friends of the institu- 
tion of African slavery in the United States for the 
purpose of acquiring more territory in Mexico and 
the Central American States ; also the acquisition 
of Cuba, thereby to extend and foster a great slave 
empire, even though it should dye those countries in 
human blood. Hence the various raids made upon 
those countries." 

These conclusions are the gleanings of an 



4 THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 

examination of many witnesses made by a jury 
possessing character and intelligence, and are 
significant as affording not merely a key to the 
purposes of a secret order, but a revelation of 
the real aim and object of the great slave move- 
ment itself. Whatever the extent and impor- 
tance of the Knights of the Golden Circle, that 
society was, in its essence, truly representative 
of the daring ambition of the Southern leaders. 
Its purpose was, as has been stated, to found 
a gigantic tropical slave empire. The Golden 
Circle was a line drawn from Havana as a centre, 
with a radius of sixteen degrees latitude and 
longitude. Here was a vast domain adapted to 
slave labor, extending from the confluence of the 
Ohio and the Mississippi to the Isthmus of 
Darien, and from the West Indies to the Pacific 
coast of Mexico. 

Mr. Draper, the historian, in his composite of 
Southern opinion, pictures this imperial realm : 

" As the Romans, basing their political life on a 
slave system, and availing themselves of the advan- 
tages of an interior sea, soon brought their feebler 
neighbors into subjection, solidly establishing theni- 
selves all around the Mediterranean, so the Gulf of 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 5 

Mexico and the Caribbean will be a Mediterranean 
for us. Feeble communities, such as those of Mexico 
and Central America, can be easily conquered by 
arms, or still more easily by gold. They will submit 
to the fate of Egypt, and Syria, and Greece. Cuba, 
Jamaica, Hayti will follow the fate of Cyprus, Sar- 
dinia, Sicily. Across a narrow isthmus is the Paci- 
fic Ocean, and where the West merges into the East 
are the venerable empires and the wealth of Asia." 

Such the dream ! Truly, a regal concept of 
barbaric splendor, as alluring to the adventurous 
as the cloud-built city of the Sun, which sits 
enthroned at the horizon, a gleaming cluster of 
golden minarets and spires. Was it as insub- 
stantial } Was it but the despairing hope of the 
fatuous, the idle fantasy of the fool t Let us 
see. 

The secret history of the war remains to be 
written, the motives of the leading conspirators 
to be explored. The alleged causes of the con- 
flict from the pens of some of them, the enu- 
meration of constitutional quibbles, are mere 
casuistry. The President and the Vice-Presi- 
dent of the Southern Confederacy would have a 
credulous posterity believe that the South tried 



6 THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 

to separate from the North, at the expense 'of a 
bloody and desolating war, simply to establish a 
naked and abstract proposition of constitutional 
law. But posthumous confessions, offered by 
way of special pleading, are not the sole reposi- 
tories of history. It is writ otherwise, uncon- 
sciously yet indelibly. The slaveholders in the 
pursuit of their ends vyere utterly indifferent to 
constitutional trammels. They used the Con- 
stitution as a shield or a sword, as necessity or 
convenience dictated. They adopted what has 
been called the " patent reversible process of 
construction." They localized slavery in the 
Territories of Missouri, Arkansas, and Florida 
by loose construction, and when those Terri- 
tories became States they protected it from 
governmental interference by strict construc- 
tion. When they agreed to the Missouri Com- 
promise, which prohibited slavery in all of the 
territory north of line 36° 30^ they affirmed 
the power of Congress to regulate slavery in the 
Teiritories. Afterwards, when they failed to 
extend this line through the Mexican purchase, 
they repealed the Missouri Compromise, and 
advocated the doctrine of squatter sovereignty, 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. / 

namely, that the people of the Territories must 
decide the question of slavery for themselves, 
free from congressional interference and without 
reference to latitude. But in the struggle to 
make the free soil of Kansas slave, they were 
unsuccessful, and then came the Dred Scott 
decision, which overturned both of the preceding 
propositions by denying in effect the power 
either of the people or of Congress to keep 
slavery out of any Territory. The conflict which 
followed was "irrepressible." Mr. Calhoun and 
the abolitionists were the prophets of their time. 
Had there been no doctrine of state sovereignty, 
the exigencies of slavery would have devised it ; 
or, even lacking it, the South would have jus- 
tified its action in the residuary right of revo- 
lution, should it have cared to justify it at all. 
As a matter of fact, at the time of secession, ''a 
decent respect to the opinions of mankind " did 
not, in its judgment, require that it should de- 
clare the causes which impelled the separation. 
We may, therefore, in this brief review, skirt 
the howling deserts of constitutional law, and 
seek a more fruitful region. 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 



11. 

To the American of the commercial present 
the scheme of empire above adverted to may 
seem to be highly visionary. The dry recital 
of the American court reads like a page of 
romance, fictions and fanciful. Yet it contains 
the soberest fact in American history. The 
Knights of the Golden Circle and the Order 
of the Lone Star, together with the countless 
other filibustering societies which abounded in 
the South during forty years before the war, 
were but the natural expression of the tenden- 
cies of the slave system. They were the symp- 
toms of a disease, the evidence of a state of 
mind. 

Fundamentally, the rebellion was a contest be- 
tween two antagonistic labor Or social systems, 
the one free, the other slave ; the one industrial 
and based upon contract, the other militant and 
based upon status. The one encouraged indi- 
vidual independence, promoted intelligence, and 
fostered invention, thereby multiplying its pro- 
ductive power many fold ; the other crushed the 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 9 

spirit by fettering the body, and conserved igno- 
rance. The one invited immigration by enno- 
bling labor ; the other repelled immigration by 
making labor the badge of servitude. The one 
created citizens, the other subjects. In fine, the 
one tended to build up a free republic, the other 
tended to the construction of a servile empire. 

The unwritten, irreversible law governing the 
economy of the South demanded two things : 
a progressively expanding territory and an in- 
crease in the number of slaves. As these were 
the organic forces which made for empire, they 
require a somewhat extended and technical ex- 
position. 

The acquisition of land by the South was an 
economical necessity. Slave labor impoverished 
and tainted where it touched. It was *' unskill- 
ful and given reluctantly." The slave worked 
just enough to avoid corporal or other punish- 
ment, as the value of any superior degree of effi- 
ciency accrued to the master and not to himself. 
Increased zeal meant increased burden. Slaves 
must be watched, and therefore, working in 
gangs, their usefulness was curtailed. They 
were confined to the culture of cotton, tobacco, 



lO THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 

sugar, and rice, which admitted of the employ- 
ment of many within a limited space, under the 
eye of the overseer. But on cereal lands they 
could not be maintained except at a loss. One 
freeman for several acres of wheat, and several 
slaves for one acre of cotton, roughly defines 
the limitations of the slave system. The slaves 
lacked versatility. They were unfitted for man- 
ufacturing, as they had not the deftness and 
education essential to the artisan, nor the stimu- 
lation of material gain or of prospective eman- 
cipation. Instructed with difficulty in the art 
of growing one staple, they could not readily be 
transferred to the culture of another, and the 
rotation of crops thus became an impossibility. 
Nor could the planter let his fields lie fallow. 
The support of his slaves was a constant drain 
upon his resources, and enforced a continuous 
tillage that met with a steadily diminishing re- 
turn. Moreover, with his entire capital invested 
in slaves, the planter had nothing to apply to 
the improvement of his lands. Even were it 
possible, it were useless, to purchase agricultural 
implements of improved construction, as they 
could not be intrusted to the care of slaves. 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 1 1 

Looked at in any way, agriculture, under the 
Southern system, was, and must have been, 
"artless and exhausting." The barren tobacco 
lands of Virginia and the Carolinas, and the 
abandoned plantations throughout the South, 
eloquently bespoke this fact. The planter 
needed virgin soil obtainable at a nominal price ; 
he would have it. This, then, was one object 
to be attained by revolution. But, it may be 
urged, that at the time of secession, only a small 
portion of the land of the South was under 
cultivation ; that political representation had 
been the sole object of the aggressions of the 
slave power ; and that the greed for land would 
cease with the South's connection with the 
Union. It is sufficient to reply that, so crude 
were the processes of slave labor, none but the 
choicest lands, those teeming with fertility, 
could be cultivated profitably, and these condi- 
tions imply comparative scarcity. Inferior soils, 
which an enlightened free labor could have 
made richly productive, and which in a free 
country would have been resorted to under pres- 
sure of population, were of necessity neglected 
as wastes, so that the disproportion mentioned 



12 THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 

was more apparent than real. If in i860 the 
planter did not need more land for the purposes 
of cultivation, he would need it within a proxi- 
mate period, and he must hold the right secure 
to obtain such land by any means that he might 
see fit, be they fair or foul. The Northern 
conscience was an embarrassing trammel, and 
might not accommodate itself readily to the re- 
quirements of the slave system. Restrict slavery 
to definite limits, and it must inevitably perish. 
A redundant population cannot subsist upon 
an exhausted -soil. Imprisonment meant death. 
The planter saw this clearly, and when he re- 
ceived his first decisive check in the Kansas- 
Nebraska struggle, he threw down the gage of 
battle, and raised the banner of Empire. 

But there was a more pressing need than land 
— slaves. Although a clause denouncing slav- 
ery had been stricken from the Declaration of In- 
dependence, at the instance of South Carolina 
and Georgia, it was expected, at the time of the 
adoption of the Constitution, that slavery would 
soon die out of itself. Indeed, the Constitution 
contemplated the abolition of the slave trade in 
1808, and when that year came, the protest of 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE, 13 

the slaveholders was of the feeblest. But with 
the invention of the cotton gin there was a 
permanent revival of slavery. When the plant- 
ers realized that a negro, with the aid of this 
machine, could cleanse three hundred and fifty 
pounds of cotton in a day, whereas, formerly, 
without it, he could cleanse only a few pounds, 
the price of slaves rose enormously, and the 
South had found a product which, it thought, 
would command the wealth, and rule the mar- 
kets of the civilized world. As the production 
of cotton increased, the relations of master 
and slave lost " whatever patriarchal character 
they possessed," with the exception of the 
household slaves, who were generally well 
treated, and slavery became " a heartless busi- 
ness speculation." The life of a slave was esti- 
mated in so many bales of cotton. Owing to 
the cruelty and the excessive burdens imposed, 
the time of the effective labor of a slave on the 
cotton plantations was reduced to seven years, 
and on the sugar plantations to five years. This 
process, together with the exhaustion of the 
soil, was pushing the color line farther south, 
year by year. The price of slaves was rising 



14 THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 

rapidly. The reopening of the slave trade was 
a necessity and must precede territorial exten- 
sion. A Georgian delegate to the Charleston 
convention in i860 went to the root of the mat- 
ter when he said : — 

" I believe that this doctrine of protection to 
slavery in the Territories is a mere theory, a mere 
abstraction. Practically, it can be of no conse- 
quence to the South, for the reason that the infant 
has been strangled before it was born. You have 
cut off the supply of slaves ; you have crippled the 
institution in the States by your unjust laws, and it 
is mere folly and madness now to ask protection for 
a nonentity, for a thing which is not there. We have 
no slaves to carry to those Territories. We can never 
make another slave State with our present supply of 
slaves. And if we could, it would not be wise, for 
the reason that if you make another slave State from 
your new Territories with the present supply of 
slaves, you will be obliged to give another State — 
either Maryland, Delaware, or Virginia — to free soil 
upon the North." 

But Virginia, a slave market, was opposed to 
competition ; and the Georgian retorted : — 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 1 5 

" It has been my fortune to go into that noble old 
State to buy a few darkies, and I have had to pay 
from $1,000 to $2,000 a head, when I could go to 
Africa and buy better negroes at $50 apiece. Un- 
questionably it is to the interest of Virginia to break 
down the African slave trade, when she can sell her 
negroes at $2,000." 

The Georgian delegate was by no means sin- 
gular in his views. The foreign and domestic 
slave trade might differ from each other in de- 
gree, perhaps, but not in kind ; and an objection 
which would lie against the one, and not against 
the other, must be sentimental rather than prac- 
tical. This, at least, was the view of many plant- 
ers and politicians of the South. The prohibition 
of the slave trade was felt to be a brand upon 
the slaveholder. In a message to the Legisla- 
ture of South Carolina (1857), Governor Adams 
argued that "if the slave trade be piracy, the 
slave must be plunder ; " and he urged the with- 
drawal of *' assent to an act which is in itself 
a direct condemnation of your institutions." In 
1858, a bill authorizing a company to import 
twenty-five hundred African negroes, who were 
to be indentured for at least fifteen years, passed 



1 6 THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 

the Louisiana House of Representatives, and 
failed by only two votes in the Senate. To 
offer a premium for the best specimen of an 
imported African and to propose a prize for 
the best sermon upon the ethics of such an im- 
portation were but incidents of the movement. 
Jefferson Davis saw " no inhumanity or sinful- 
ness " in the slave trade, while Alexander H. 
Stephens wished to impress upon the Southern 
mind *' the great truth that without an increase 
of African slaves from abroad " many more 
slave States need not be looked for. 

However, the South determined to bide the 
issue of the war before attempting to force the 
question. The constitutional prohibition of the 
slave trade, adopted at Montgomery, was a part 
of the price of Virginia's withdrawal from the 
Union, and was a concession to the sentiment 
of Europe, whose sympathy and aid the South 
needed and expected. The slave trade was only 
a question of time ; it would " bring slaves to the 
poor man, increase the population, and thereby 
the value of land." Legal enactments prohib- 
iting it would be inoperative, and as a matter of 
fact they were. It is estimated that, during 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 1/ 

eighteen months of 1859 and i860, eighty-five 
vessels were fitted out from New York city 
alone for the slave trade, and that from thirty 
to sixty thousand negroes were brought to the 
United States annually. De Bow's Commercial 
Review calculated in 1857 that forty slavers 
were making a net annual profit of about seven- 
teen millions of dollars. It is certain that, under 
the Confederate government, the provision pro- 
hibiting the slave trade would have broken down 
utterly, were it not formally stricken out of the 
Constitution. The demand for cotton, which, 
judged from the past, would increase at the rate 
of nearly 100 per cent, in a decade, would make 
this imperative, because the production of slaves 
could not be expected to increase more than 
thirty per cent, in the same period. Thus the 
reopening of the slave trade was the second ob- 
ject to be attained by revolution. 

But more land meant the conquest of Mexico 
and Central America, as physical and political 
conditions were a sufficient bar to a northerly 
or westerly extension of the Southern system ; 
and more slaves meant the annexation of Cuba, 
— a slave nursery, — and renewed commerce 



1 8 THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 

with the distant coasts of Africa. The inexo- 
rable logic of successful rebellion was the crea- 
tion of a tropical slave empire. 



III. 

That this empire was the inevitable product 
of natural and social laws is a proposition sus- 
ceptible of much illustration. Slavery was the 
basal fact of Southern society, the corner-stone 
of a feudal superstructure.- An impoverished 
people can be neither independent nor intel- 
lectual, and slavery was bankrupting the South. 
It not only exaggerated the natural inequalities 
of the distribution of wealth, — that primal 
cause of the world's social disorders, — it para- 
lyzed production. Itself inefficient, it encour- 
aged improvidence. The planters were heavily 
in debt to Northern capitalists, no less because 
of the wastefulness of the slave system and 
the abnormally large amount of capital that it 
required, than because of their own extrava- 
gance. Where to labor is ignominy, prudence, 
economy, and careful business methods fall un- 
der the ban. The great wealth of the South 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 1 9 

was a delusion. The Northern hay crop alone 
exceeded in value that of the Southern cotton, 
tobacco, and rice crops. Cotton was king by 
usurpation, not by right. The forcing system 
reduced the price, and narrowed the margin of 
profit to the vanishing point. But the price of 
slaves suffered no reduction, being governed by 
the market value in the most productive regions. 
The number of plantations decreased, the larger 
absorbing the smaller. There was little diver- 
sity of industry in the South, ** slave agricul- 
ture by a sure law banishing all pursuits but its 
own." The South was an exporter of raw mate- 
rials, and an importer of almost all finished fab- 
rics, necessaries as well as luxuries. The slave 
system forbade immigration, and the South lost 
heavily by emigration. More than a half mil- 
lion of its citizens sought the Middle and West- 
ern States, carrying with them prejudices, which 
afterwards found expression in the black laws, 
and in active sympathy with Southern and 
Northwestern secession. Capital was also driven, 
to the North, seeking profitable investment. In 
the sectional rivalry slavery made but a halting 
race. The great natural resources of the South, 



20 THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 

the exuberant fertility of the soil, the richness 
of the mineral deposits, and the commercial ad- 
vantages afforded by the coast line and by the 
great rivers, availed it naught. At the begin- 
ning of government. North and South were 
nearly equal in population, trade, and property. 
But within seventy years, the disproportion be- 
tween the numbers and the wealth of the two 
sections became very great and striking, and 
was clearly traceable to the economic systems 
respectively existing. Out of these systems 
grew two civilizations, which, differing in funda- 
mentals, were at last formally arrayed against 
each other. That of the North was instinct with 
life and progress ; that of the South was a relic 
of the dark ages. The one was the rosy child 
of the dawn ; the other, the gruesome spectre of 
a departing night. 

The South was never a republic in the North- 
ern or democratic sense of the word. It was 
government by aristocracy. Its civilization par- 
took somewhat of the Middle Ages, in that the 
redress of many wrongs was referred to the ar- 
bitrament of arms, and in that the laws, as in 
the dawn of European jurisprudence, were use- 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 21 

ful in confirming the abuses of a social system. 
There were few large towns, and the planters 
lived apart upon their estates, like the feudal 
lords of an agricultural community before the 
rise of manufacturing. They were the owners 
of the soil which was cultivated by their serfs. 
Their allegiance to the central government they 
held as lightly as ever did feudal chief hold his 
allegiance to the crown, and finally they took up 
arms against it. The Barons' wars may be found 
in miniature in the Southern feuds, whereby 
whole families were sometimes extirpated. In 
the arts of social life the resemblance was strong. 
The planters, a leisure class, lived a free and 
open-handed life. They devoted themselves to 
excitement and pleasure, and these they found 
in pursuits as diverse as politics, gambling, and 
field sports. A constant contact with a de- 
grading servitude made them intensely jealous 
of their superiority and liberties, while their ab- 
solutism was that of the manorial lord. They 
were brave to daring, high spirited, arrogant, 
and brutal in controversy ; and they gloried in 
a bastard chivalry. They accepted slavery as 
an ordinance of nature, and they adopted its 



22 THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 

cruelties without mitigating them. But to say 
that the slaveholders were nevertheless distin- 
guished by undeniable virtues is to utter no 
greater paradox than is to be found upon every 
page of the history of morals. They were in, 
but not of, the industrial age, and they possessed 
the vices and virtues of their stage of civiliza- 
tion. Among their finer attributes was a genial 
and florid hospitality, which was partly the out- 
growth of the loneliness of plantation life. The 
social atmosphere of the South possessed a cer- 
tain indolent charm imparted to it by a leisure 
class who were also dominant. There was an 
absence of the compelling rigors of the North- 
ern climate, and of the Puritanic element which 
takes the world and its work seriously. Out- 
side the planter aristocracy, the South was poor 
in all that goes to make up modern civilized 
life. Slavery bore upon it with the weight of a 
dead hand. Science was without place where 
society was in a primitive state, and useless 
where labor was degraded. The diffusion of 
population acted as a bar to the growth of the 
professions, and to systematic instruction. Ed- 
ucation was denied by legal sanction to one third 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 23 

of the population, and like law, was the patri- 
mony of the rich. But the sociological condition 
of the South was most vividly reflected in that 
melancholy product of the slave system, the 
vagrant or " mean-white " population. In a 
slave country there is no place for the bour- 
geoisie, the well-to-do middle class, who, in Eu- 
rope, have served as the bulwark of liberty. 
As the shortest way to a proper understanding 
of the social effect of slave labor, I may be 
pardoned a long quotation from a work of an 
eminent political economist, the late Mr. Cairnes. 
He says : — 

" It happens that there are in all slave countries 
vast districts, becoming, under the deteriorating ef- 
fects of slave industry, constantly larger, which are 
wholly surrendered to nature and remain forever as 
wilderness. This is a characteristic feature in the 
political economy of the Slave States of the South, 
and is attended with social consequences of the most 
important kind. For the tracts thus left, or made 
desolate, become in time the resort of a numerous 
horde of people, who, too poor to keep slaves and 
too proud to work, prefer a vagrant and precarious 
life spent in the desert to engaging in occupations 



24 THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 

which would associate them with the slaves whom 
they despise. In the Southern States no less than 
five millions of human beings ^ are now said to 
exist in this manner in a condition little removed 
from savage life, eking out a wretched subsistence 
by hunting, by fishing, by hiring themselves out for 
occasional jobs, by plunder. Combining the rest- 
lessness and contempt for regular industry peculiar 
to the savage with the vices of the proletaire of 
civilized communities, these people make up a class 
at once degraded and dangerous, and, constantly 
reinforced as they are by all that is idle, worthless, 
and lawless among the population of the neighbor- 
ing States, form an inexhaustible preserve of ruf- 
fianism, ready at hand for all the worst purposes 
of Southern ambition. The planters complain of 
these people for their idleness, for corrupting their 
slaves, for their thievish propensities ; but they can- 
not dispense with them ; for in truth they perform 
an indispensable function in the economy of slave 
societies, of which they are at once the victims 
and the principal supports. It is from their ranks 
that those filibustering expeditions are recruited, 
which have been found so effective an instrument in 
extending the domain of the slave power ; they fur- 

^ This number is undoubtedly exaggerated. 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 25 

nish the border ruffians who, in the colonization 
struggle with the Northern States, contend with Free- 
soilers in the Territories, and it is to their antipathy 
to the negroes that the planters securely trust for re- 
pressing every attempt at servile insurrection. Such 
are the ' mean whites ' or ' white trash ' of the 
Southern States. They comprise several local sub- 
divisions, the 'crackers,' the ' sand-hillers,' the 
' clay-eaters,' and many more. The class is not 
peculiar to any one locality, but is the invariable 
outgrowth of negro slavery wherever it has raised 
its head in modern times. It may be seen in the 
new State of Texas, as well as in the old settled 
districts of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia ; 
in the West India Islands no less than on the 
Continent." ^ 

As the slave system of the Roman Republic 
created vast landed estates in Italy, and drove 
the free laborers to the cities, v^rhere, fed upon 
public largesses, voted by ambitious dema- 
gogues, they made a despotic empire the alter- 
native of anarchy, so the slave system of the 
South sapped the vitality of free government by 

1 The Slave Power, J. E. Cairnes, pp. 54, 55. New York, 1S61. 
A remarkable book, now out of print. Reviewed by John 
Stuart Mill, Diss, and Diss., vol. iii. p. 264. 



26 THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 

making homeless outcasts of American citizens, 
and by creating a plutocracy. 

Of the moral aspect of slavery it is unneces- 
sary to speak at length. A system which gave 
repute to slave breeding it is not difficult to 
characterize. Even the church was summoned 
to the defense of an institution which violated 
those great primary laws that we justly hold 
divine, — the right of human freedom and the 
sanctity of wifehood. Slavery tore families 
asunder at the auction block, and sold the mem- 
bers to a living death. It made marriage vows 
as false as dicers' oaths, and sweet religion a 
rhapsody of words. Fortified in selfish greed, 
it enlisted to its support the lowest instincts 
of man, and transfigured with hate the face of 
mercy. It corrupted the master, the slave, and 
the circumjacent community. 

IV. 

So much for the tendencies of the slave sys- 
tem. Turning now to something more tangible, 
to those pages of history which record the su- 
premacy of the slave power, we shall find our 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 2/ 

deduction verified by an ample induction. With 
the purchase of Florida, the slave interest, just 
then crystallizing into that aggressive, unscrupu- 
lous, and despotic oligarchy, the slave power, en- 
tered upon its career of stupendous conquest, 
which was so nearly to end in the creation of a 
gigantic tropical slave empire. The attempts, 
unsuccessful and otherwise, made by the slave- 
holders to acquire Florida, Texas, California, 
Mexico, Cuba, and Central America are but the 
successive steps of an evolution proceeding 
along the lines of economic law. The end to be 
attained, however romantic and daring it may 
seem to be to us, was entirely practical, and only 
a frightful civil war served to defeat it. South- 
ward the course of empire held its way. 

From the time of Cortes the country encom- 
passing the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean 
had dazzled the imagination of adventurers, and 
had tempted many of them to their death. The 
mysteries of its shores were celebrated by the 
wonder loving. There swooned the 'air, heavy 
with fragrance ; the embracing skies were liquid 
depths of azure. Nature was rich in color, and 
was adorned with precious gems, which awaken 



28 THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 

in tremulous beauty to the kiss of the light. 
In the forest aisles the music of birds mingled 
with the sweet chimings of the waters of the 
fountain of eternal youth, and near by lay hid- 
den the golden city, the very Eldorado of song 
and story. It was dreamland. After the colo- 
nies had achieved independence, this region at- 
tracted the attention of statesmen. Hamilton, 
who had his eye upon Florida, encouraged Mi- 
randa in his filibustering expeditions against the 
Spanish-American possessions, Jefferson bought 
Louisiana, and Burr undertook his futile venture 
against Mexico. 

It has been said that there were utilitarian 
reasons entirely apart from the interests of sla- 
very which demanded the cession of Florida. 
This is true of the taking of West Florida. But 
in the acquisition of the peninsula slavery was 
an efficient agent. Of the resources of East 
Florida, next to nothing was known. Generally, 
that province was regarded as a huge wilder- 
ness and swamp, and was chiefly desirable be- 
cause it afforded a refuge for fugitive slaves 
beyond the jurisdiction of the United States. 
The history of the acquisition is long and scan- 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 29 

dalous, and need not be told here. It is a story 
of desultory warfare, ofttimes merciless, against 
whomsoever should harbor fugitive slaves, or 
should otherwise harass the Georgian frontier, 
be the offenders Creeks, Seminoles, or Span- 
iards. It involved gross treachery, murder, 
and wanton invasion of foreign soil. Five times 
in seven years was Florida invaded : once during 
the war of 18 12, by General Jackson, and twice 
during the same period by Georgia's lawless ex- 
peditions. To Georgia, a State which had been 
largely instrumental in forcing the three fifths 
provision upon the Constitutional Convention, 
in securing a twenty years* lease of legal life 
to the slave trade, and in debasing the first ex- 
ercise of the national treaty-making power to 
the return of her fugitive slaves, belongs the 
invidious distinction of first harnessing the fili- 
busters to the slave car. After the war of 18 12, 
the United States disavowed Georgia's arbitrary 
invasions, and Florida was reluctantly aban- 
doned. Temporarily, however. A fort on the 
Appalachicola River, — sixty miles beyond the 
boundary of the United States, — which had 
been seized as a defensive post by the Florida 



30 THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE, 

exiles, appeared to the Georgian mind to be 
a constant menace to the repose of a slave so- 
ciety, and General Jackson ordered it to be de- 
stroyed. A red-hot shot from a United States 
gunboat exploded the magazine of the fort, 
thereby instantly killing two hundred and sev- 
enty of the occupants (two thirds of whom were 
women and children), and wounding all but three 
of the rest. Those negroes who recovered from 
their wounds were restored to Georgian claim- 
ants, being given up in some instances, we are 
told, *' to the descendants of those who claimed 
to have owned their ancestors generations be- 
fore." Twenty years later. Congress suitably 
rewarded this gallant deed with an appropria- 
tion. 

The fifth and last invasion of Florida was 
made by Jackson under cover of the first Semi- 
nole war, which was a heritage of the slaughter 
at *' Negro Fort." Jackson promised the Presi- 
dent that he would conquer Florida within sixty 
days, and his was no idle word. An observance 
of the niceties of international law, as well as 
of the rules of civilized warfare, did not distin- 
guish this raid of conquest from other under- 



THE SOUTHERN- EMPIRE. 3 I 

takings of a similar character. The aid of di- 
plomacy had been invoked long before, and 
Spain, powerless to protect her citizens and 
territory from outrage, now agreed to sell Flor- 
ida. Of one condition, however, she was tena- 
cious to the end, — the United States must aban- 
don all claims to Texas. As the slaveholders 
were eager, Texas was signed away. It would 
doubtless be recovered in good time when it was 
needed. Thus, in short, were seventy-nine thou- 
sand square miles of territory gained for slavery. 
If the purpose of this purchase was to quiet the 
border, the treaty signally failed. The negroes 
continued to seek asylum among the Seminoles, 
and the government decreed the banishment of 
that tribe to the West, together with the sub- 
jection of it to the Creek Indians, who claimed 
the Seminole exiles as their slaves. 

Out of this unfortunate order grew that bloody, 
protracted, and expensive man-hunt known as 
the second Seminole war. Among the collateral 
causes of this war may be mentioned the appli- 
cation of the xvXq, partus seqidtur ventrem, to the 
children of those Indians who had married slave 
women. Under cover of this law, the half-breed 



32 THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 

wife of Osceola, a Seminole chief, was seized 
while she was visiting Fort King. Her husband 
took a stealthy and terrible revenge ; and this 
was the beginning of general hostilities. Af- 
terwards Osceola himself was taken by treach- 
ery, and died in prison. But indeed the whole 
conflict was marked with great perfidy and 
cruelty. For the purpose of tracking the 
slave exiles, the legislature of Florida authorized 
the purchase of Cuban bloodhounds, and, as an 
incentive to his soldiers, General Jesup offered 
captive negroes as prizes of war. The struggle 
lasted six years, and resulted in reclaiming to 
slavery five hundred fugitives, at a cost to the 
United States of ;^8o,ooo for each person reen- 
slaved. 

V. 

The enterprise to which the slaveholders 
next directed their energies was nothing less 
than the stealing of an empire. In the lower 
house of Congress the slave States were in a 
hopeless minority, although their representation 
there was based partly upon an enumeration of 
slaves. To preserve an equality in the Senate, 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 33 

where the representation was arbitrary, was 
therefore indispensable. A slave State must be 
found as a complement to every new free State 
admitted. But the slave power could look only 
to the Southwest for new States, and there an 
event had occurred which threatened to close to 
them forever this highway to future dominion. 

In 1 82 1, revolution had swept away the au- 
thority of Spain in North America, and Texas- 
Coahuila became a member of the new State 
of Mexico, under a constitution which made 
freedom a birthright, and which forbade the 
importation of slaves. In 1829, the dictator of 
Mexico, Guerrero, freed all persons held in 
slavery within his dominions, and this decree 
was reaffirmed afterwards in the constitutions 
of the Mexican republic. The American slave 
power hastened to meet the impending danger, 
Texas must be recovered at all hazards, and 
speedily. The refusal of the Mexican govern- 
ment to entertain any proposition of purchase 
cut off the only means of lawful acquisition, 
and thereupon Texas became the subject of a 
far-reaching intrigue. The Southwest had never 
been reconciled to the cession of Texas, and in- 



34 THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 

dividuals anticipated, in a measure, the after-de- 
signs of the slave power by undertaking to colo- 
nize this territory for their own gain and profit. 
Only a few months subsequent to the making of 
the Florida treaty, Long, at the head of a band 
of Mississippi filibusters, entered Texas, and pro- 
claimed its independence. There being as yet 
no settlers from the United States in Texas, the 
project failed. Later, adventurers from Ten- 
nessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana went to Texas 
under the guise of persecuted Roman Catholics, 
and obtained grants of land from Mexico, which 
was a Catholic state. These pious gentlemen 
offered land premiums for the importation "of 
slaves, and opened up a lucrative trade which 
extended even to Africa. Swindling land com- 
panies were organized, and worthless stock and 
scrip, purporting to be preparatory titles to land, 
were floated in large quantities. By means such 
as these, many Northern people became finan- 
cially interested in the annexation of the new 
State. Slaves were introduced into Texas from 
the United States in open defiance of law, or 
under the technical description of " apprentices 
for ninety-nine years," and Mexican laws limit- 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 35 

ing apprenticeship to ten years, and totally pro- 
hibiting immigration from the United States, 
became dead letters when the troops sent to 
enforce them were recalled to the capital. The 
time was now ripe actively to assist emigration 
to Texas, and the slave power set rolling thither 
"the tide of vagrant blackguardism." "There 
was probably never seen a more ferocious com- 
pany of ruffians than Texas contains at this mo- 
ment," wrote Harriet Martineau in 1835. Arms 
and stores were sent to them as sinews for the 
coming war. General Sam Houston, an inti- 
mate friend of President Jackson, who himself 
had vainly endeavored to purchase Texas, went 
to that province with the avowed intention of 
wresting it from Mexico. With the details of 
the contest which followed we are not concerned. 
The complete success achieved by Houston is 
a matter of history. It is of more moment to 
observe that slavery was made the corner-stone 
of the new Texan republic, and that the Consti- 
tution of that State denied the power of eman- 
cipation to its Congress, or to any slaveholder, 
unless he had the consent of Congress. This 
instrument was adopted in March, 1836, and 



36 THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 

the recognition of Texas by the United States 
followed promptly at the next session of Con- 
gress. Texas being independent, its annexa- 
tion to the American Union was a foregone 
conclusion. England, a heavy creditor to the 
new State, might foreclose upon the govern- 
ment itself, and abolish slavery, thus making 
Houston's war nugatory. And there were 
other contingencies. The slave power of the 
United States endeavored during ten years to 
obtain the two thirds vote in the Senate neces- 
sary to the ratification of an annexation treaty, 
and finally, despairing of it, it annexed Texas 
by joint resolution. As the independence of 
Texas had not yet been conceded by Mexico, 
annexation was a casus belli. Even this offense 
our weaker neighbor seemed willing to con- 
done, and diplomacy might have averted bloody 
strife ; but the slaveholders would not have it 
so. Their appetite had grown by what it fed 
upon, and they demanded more land. The Rio 
Grande, and not the Nueces River, said they, 
was the western boundary of Texas, and thus 
was the United States embarked upon another 
unholy war of conquest. This struggle, like 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 37 

the war of 1812, was fomented by the South 
under cover of '' manifest destiny." To Young- 
Democracy, the second conflict with Great 
Britain meant not only protection, but vindica- 
tion. They had in view the conquest of Can- 
ada. Nay, even more. John Randolph, who 
satirized the dream of the visionaries, '' seemed 
to see the capital in motion towards the falls of 
the Ohio, after a short sojourn taking its flight 
to the Mississippi, and finally alighting at Darien, 
which . . . will be a most eligible seat of gov- 
ernment for the new republic (or empire) of the 
two Americas." Truth is stranger than fiction, 
and these words read like a shrill prophecy. 
Events followed fast in the direction pointed 
* out by the cynic of Roanoke. The cession of 
New Mexico and California to the United States 
at the treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo was no 
afterthought. The ambition of the slaveholders 
was not confined to the territory between the 
Rio Grande and the Nueces. Before the be- 
ginning of hostihties, Slidell had been sent to 
Mexico to offer $25,000,000 for New Mexico 
and California, provinces which afterward cost 
us $95,000,000, not to mention 30,000 lives. 



38 THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 



VI. 

The underlying purpose of the Mexican war 
was brought to view as early as 1842, when 
Henry A. Wise (whose intrigues afterwards 
made Calhoun Secretary of State) " babbled the 
whole project " (to use the words of John 
Quincy Adams) in a speech delivered in the 
House of Representatives: — 

"Let her [Texas] once raise the flag of foreign 
conquest, let her once proclaim a crusade against the 
rich States south of her . . . [and] volunteers from all 
the States in the great valley of the Mississippi, be- 
fore whom no Mexican troops could stand an hour, • 
would plant the lone star of the Texas banner upon 
the Mexican capital. They would drive Santa Anna 
to the south, and the boundless wealth of captured 
towns and rifled churches, and a lazy, vicious, and 
luxurious priesthood would soon enable Texas to 
pay her soldiers and redeem her state debt, and push 
her victorious arms to the very shores of the Pacific. 
And would not all this extend slavery 'i Yes, slavery 
should pour itself abroad without restraint, and find 
no limit but the Southern Ocean." 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 39 

This impetuous utterance affords a picture of 
what probably would have happened had the 
slave power been unbridled. As it was, the 
slave party went far. At the conclusion of the 
Mexican war, wholesale annexation was openly 
advocated by Democratic meetings, and by lead- 
ing journals throughout the United States, and 
President Polk gave this feeling articulate ex- 
pression, by declaring in his annual message to 
Congress : — 

" If, after affording this encouragement and pro- 
tection, and after all the persevering and sincere 
efforts we have made from the moment Mexico com- 
menced the war [sic], and prior to that time, to ad- 
just our differences with her, we shall ultimately fail, 
then we shall have exhausted all honorable means 
in pursuit of peace, and must continue to occupy 
her country with our troops, taking the full measure 
of indemnity into our own hands, and must enforce 
the terms which our honor demands." 

But it was not to be. Although the Northern 
people did not seriously oppose the purchase of 
sparsely populated States, such as California 
and New Mexico, they felt that the government 
of alien races was repugnant to republican insti- 



40 THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 

tutions, colonization and Americanization being 
a condition precedent. Besides, there were other 
cogent objections. The annexation of Mexico 
meant prolonged military occupation, with a 
consequent increase of taxes, and the Northern 
people were already weary of a war to which 
they had given only a half-hearted support. The 
invasion of Mexico was a wanton and lustful 
act, and the successes of our arms never recon- 
ciled them to it. They had been fooled in re- 
spect to this thing from the beginning. The 
promised adjustment of the Oregon boundary 
— the slaveholders' sop to the North — was 
a trick. " 54° 40' or fight " had had a craven 
ending. 

But it was the impolitic efforts of the slave 
power to secure the fruits of their victory over 
Mexico that exhausted the patience of the North. 
By the treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo, Mexico 
ceded to the United States an area nearly equal 
to that of the thirteen original States. In this 
territory slavery had been abolished by Mexico, 
and, as the freesoilers contended, it could be 
restored only by act of positive law. Although 
the Northern people were not disposed to inter- 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 4 1 

fere with slavery in the accepted slave States, 
conceding it to be a vested customary right 
there, recognized by the organic law, and pro- 
tected by the lex locij they hated the system 
none the less, and determined that the new ter- 
ritories acquired from Mexico should never be 
polluted by traffic in human flesh. The slave 
power determined otherwise. What was the 
Mexican war for ? If any doubt existed, the 
letter addressed by Mr. Trist to his chief, Secre- 
tary Buchanan, could officially dispel it. Mr. 
Trist had been sent to Mexico during the prog- 
ress of the Mexican war, to negotiate a peace 
based upon the cession of New Mexico, the two 
Californias, and a right of way through the 
Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and he wrote as fol- 
lows : — 

" I concluded by assuring them (the Mexican 
Commissioners) that if it were in their power to 
offer me the whole territory described in our project, 
increased tenfold in value, and, in addition to that, 
covered a foot thick all over with pure gold, upon 
the single condition that slavery should be excluded 
therefrom, I could not entertain the offer for a mo- 
ment, nor think even of communicating it to Wash- 
ington." 



42 THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 

Small wonder, then, that the Wilmot Proviso 
and kindred propositions should make the slave- 
holders gasp. All that bloodshed for nothing ! 
Here was the beginning of the end. The 
slaveholders were filled with bitterness. A 
Democratic war had produced only Whig gen- 
erals, one of whom, elected to the Presidency, 
had inflicted a parricidal stab by urging the 
admission of California as a free State. The 
gigantic stretch of country ceded by the treaty 
of Guadaloupe Hidalgo promised to be a barren 
acquisition. The Union stood upon the brink 
of dissolution. At last the chasm was bridged 
by a compromise. On the one hand, California 
was admitted as a free State, — an unavoid- 
able concession, inasmuch as most of the gold 
hunters were from the North. On the other 
hand, the legislatures of the Territories of New 
Mexico and Utah were forbidden to enact any 
laws relating to slavery, and new States were 
to be admitted to the Union with or without 
slavery, as their respective constitutions should 
provide. After this the running was easy. The 
repeal of the Missouri Compromise logically 
followed ; and all too quickly. The Northern 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 43 

people received this overt breach of faith as 
a threat against the perpetuity of free govern- 
ment which no sophistry could explain or con- 
done. It was a sure presage of the awful 
storm. Thomas H. Benton, who, in current 
political matters was the best-informed man of 
his time, treats significantly of this crisis : — 

" Up to Mr. Pierce's administration the plan had 
been defensive ; that is to say, to make the seces- 
sion of the South a means of self-defense against 
the abolition encroachments, aggressions, and cru- 
sades of the North. In the time of Mr. Pierce the 
plan became offensive ; that is to say, to commence 
the expansion of slavery and the organization of 
territory to spread it over, so as to overpower the 
North with new slave States and drive them out of 
the Union. In this change of tactics originated the 
abrogation of the Missouri Compromise ; the attempt 
to purchase one half of Mexico, and the actual 
purchase of a large part ; the design to take Cuba ; 
the encouragement to Kinney and Walker in Cen- 
tral America ; the quarrels with Great Britain for 
outlandish coasts and islands ; the designs upon the 
Tehuantepec, the Nicaragua, the Panama, and the 
Darien route ; and the scheme to get a foothold in 
the island of San Domingo." 



^4 THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 

Herein we observe not so much a change of 
poUcy as an evolution thereof. Mr. Benton out- 
lines with distinctness the future slave empire, 
towards which the South, in obedience to eco- 
nomic, social, and political conditions, had been 
tending for a half century. It is unnecessary to 
follow specifically his catalogue of events. It is 
sufficient to give a few details of the *' grand 
movement " to which the slaveholders boastingly 
referred. Guadaloupe Hidalgo had not satisfied 
them ; they must have more land ! In a speech 
delivered in Congress upon the eve of the pas- 
sage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, Mr. Benton 
threw light into dark places when he said : — 

" What is a state secret in the city of Washington 
is street talk in the city of Montezuma. First. The 
mission of Mr. Gadsden to Santa Anna. It must 
have been conceived about the time that this bill 
was ; and, according to transpiring accounts, must 
have been a grand movement in itself, — $50,000,- 
000 for as much Mexican territory on our Southern 
border as would make five or six States of the first 
class. The area of the acquisition, as I understand 
it, was to extend from sea to sea, on a line that would 
give us Santander, Monterey, Saltillo, Parras, So- 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 45 

noro, and all lower California. This was certainly a 
large movement, both in point of money and of ter- 
ritory, and also large in political consequence ; and 
clearly furnishing a theatre for the doctrine of non- 
intervention, if there should be any design to convert 
the newly-acquired territory from free soil, that it is, 
into slave soil, that it might be desired to be. Here, 
then, I believe I have found one branch of the grand 
movement ; and although Mr. Gadsden returned 
from his mission with a small slice only of the de- 
sired territory, yet he has returned to his post, and 
may have better luck on a second trial, — if Santa 
Anna escapes from the speckled Indians (Los Indies 
Pintos) who have him at bay in the Sierra. I say 
•nothing on the merits of this new acquisition, only 
that it is an old acquaintance with me, having first 
heard of it in November, 1846, and afterwards in 
March, 1848, at which latter time it was proposed in 
the Senate (by Mr. Davis, of Mississippi) on the rat- 
ification of Guadaloupe Hidalgo treaty ; and rejected 
by the Senate. I voted against the Santander and 
Monterey line then ; and have not seen cause to 
change my opinion. [Here Mr. Benton read the 
article proposed by Mr. Davis for the new line.] 
Secondly. The mission of Mr. Soule to Madrid, — 
also a grand movement in itself, if reports be true, — 
two hundred and fifty millions for Cuba, and a 



4.6 THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 

rumpus is kicked up if tlie island is not got. . . . Mr. 
Chairman : I discuss nothing in relation to those 
rumored acquisitions of the island of Cuba and a 
broad side of Mexico j I only call attention to them 
as probable indexes to the grand movement of which 
the member from Georgia gave us the revelation, 
and which no one has denied." 

Within eight years (1845-53) the slaveholders 
had added nearly 1,000,000 square miles of ter- 
ritory to the United States. When the disposi- 
tion of the soil then acquired by them seemed 
likely to be unsatisfactory, they turned, natu- 
rally, to Cuba, where the status of slavery v^as 
beyond dispute. Buchanan endeavored, during 
a decade, to gain this island for the slave power. 
As Secretary of State under Polk, he offered 
one hundred millions of dollars for it, a proposi- 
tion which met with short shrift. In 1854, as 
Minister to England, he signed the Ostend 
Manifesto, a collaboration which proclaimed to 
an astonished world the purpose of the United 
States to take Cuba vi et armis, if methods less 
arbitrary should not avail. In 1858, as Presi- 
dent, he urged Congress to purchase the island, 
and Slidell introduced a bill appropriating thirty 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 47 

millions of dollars as a payment upon account ; 
but this measure was never pressed to a vote. 
In i860, both the Charleston and the Balti- 
more conventions indorsed the Cuban project. 

Mr. Buchanan, in his zeal, was merely repre- 
sentative of the temper of the South. The 
convention which nominated him for President, 
in 1856, adopted as its own the doctrine of 
imperial conquest, by expressing sympathy with 
the efforts which were being "made by the 
people of Central America " to " regenerate the 
isthmus," and by resolving that it would expect 
that every proper exertion would be put forth to 
"insure our ascendency in the Gulf of Mexico." 

In the light of this declaration, it is not strange 
that Stephen A. Douglas, as an aspirant for 
the Democratic nomination for the presidency, 
should deem it necessary to commit himself 
unreservedly to the policy of annexation. In 
New Orleans (1858) he said : "It is our destiny 
to have Cuba, and it is folly to debate the ques- 
tion. ... Its acquisition is a matter of time 
only. . . . The same is true of Central America 
and Mexico. It will not do to say we have ter- 
ritory enough." 



48 THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 

Meantime, those pioneers of Southern empire, 
the filibusters, were not idle. Lopez twice in- 
vaded Cuba, and died in an attempt to revolu- 
tionize it. The Order of the Lone Star, 28,000 
strong, under the leadership of Governor Quit- 
man, of Mississippi, had been enlisted for the 
same purpose. Expeditions such as these were 
the last convulsive efforts made by the slave 
power to extend its dominions. Walker in- 
vaded Central America, and reestablished slavery 
in Nicaragua, but he could not maintain him- 
self for long. It is said that he was aided in his 
conspiracy by Knights of the Golden Circle. 
Several years later (i860) this organization was 
intent upon the seizure of Guanajuato, the 
richest mining province of Mexico, if not of the 
world, when its plans were exposed by George 
D. Prentice, editor of the *' Louisville Journal." 
The ritual of the society is typical, and it will be 
instructive to set out a part of it, including the 
obligation of the candidate for the first degree. 

" Under the laws of 2 (Mexico) every emigrant 
receives from the state authorities a grant of 640 
acres of land. Under a treaty closed with 3 (Manuel 
Doblado, Governor of Guanajuato), on the nth of 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 49 

February, i860, we are invited to colonize in 2 
(Mexico), to enable the best people there to estab- 
lish a permanent government. We agree to intro- 
duce a force of 16,000 men, armed, equipped, and 
provided, and to take the field under the command 
of 3 (Doblado), who agrees to furnish an equal 
number of men to be officered by K. G. C.'s. To 
cover the original expenses of arming our forces, 
there is mortgaged to our Trustees the right to 
collect one half the annual revenues of 4 (Guana- 
juato), until we are paid the sum of $840,000. As a 
bonus there is also ceded to us 355,000 acres of 
land. The pay of the army is the same as the regu- 
lar army of 2 (Mexico), which is about one eighth 
that of the United States. To secure this there is 
mortgaged to us all the public property of 4 (Guana- 
juato) amounting in taxable value to $23,000,000. 
3 (Doblado) is now there making arrangements for 
our reception." 

The initiate says that he will do all that he 
can, as an honorable man, to make "58 (a slave 
State) of 2 (Mexico)." As such he will "urge its 
83 (annexation) to 72 (United States) ; otherwise 
he will oppose it with equal zeal." He will " sus- 
tain the effort to reduce the %Z (Peon system) to 
89 (perpetual slavery)." " Until the whole civil, 



50 THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 

political, financial, and religious reconstruction 
of 2 (Mexico) has been completed, he will rec- 
ognize 90 (limited monarchy) as the best form 
of 63 (government) for the purpose in view, since 
it can be made strong and effective." He fur- 
ther pledges himself to support no leader of the 
organization who will not swear " to extend 91 
(slavery) over the whole 92 (Central America) if 
in his power. He shall try to acquire 93 (Cuba) 
and control 94 (the Gulf of Mexico)." 

The Knights of the Golden Circle were to 
concentrate in " 20 (Encinal County, Texas) by 
September 15, i860 (a misprint, we presume, 
for 61. — Ed. of Journal), and will cross 5 (Rio 
Grande) by the first day of 6 (October)." 

The " Louisville Journal " declared that nearly 
three thousand persons had been admitted into 
the order ^ in Louisville, a majority of them be- 
ing non-residents. 

1 The Knights of the Golden Circle were variously styled, 
during a checkered career, The Circle, The Golden Circle, 
Circle of Honor, Knights of the Golden Circle, Knights of the 
Mighty Host, Order of American Knights, etc., etc. The 
late Senator Morton once said that this society changed its 
name as often as a thief, and pretty much for the same rea- 
sons. When the war began, it crossed the Ohio River, and 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 5 1 



VII. ' 

But filibustering expeditions were poor ex- 
pedients, unless they should be supported by a 
vigorous and consistent policy of state ; and this 
the slaveholders were unable to guarantee so 
long as they were subject to the restraints im- 
posed by a union with a free North. Expan- 
sion — more land and more slaves — was the life 
of slavery ; and its partisans must be in a posi- 
tion to map out and to carry out a comprehen- 
sive scheme of conquest. This was the purpose 
of secession, which could have no other suffi- 
cient object. The existing slave interests were 
not menaced, and needed no protection. Gid- 
dings tells us that, despite the vast amount of 
muddy assertion to the contrary, no bill, resolu- 
tion, or other measure was introduced into either 
house of Congress, from the time of the forma- 
tion of the Constitution to the civil war, which 

found lodgment in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, where, after a 
brief and inglorious career, it died. It was succeeded by the 
Sons of Liberty, a formidable secret organization, whose object 
was the establishment of a Northwestern Confederacy. 



52 THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 

looked to the abolition of slavery in any of the 
States where it existed. The Crittenden com- 
promise beggared the South of all apology for 
seceding. It embodied the following proposi- 
tions, to wit : Slavery to be recognized as exist- 
ing in all the territory south of line 36° 30', to 
be perpetually free from interference by Con- 
gress, and to be protected as property during its 
continuance by all the departments of the ter- 
ritorial government. New States were to be 
admitted to the Union with or without slavery, 
as their constitutions should provide, — the pet 
doctrine of non-intervention. Congress was 
forbidden to abolish slavery in places under its 
exclusive jurisdiction and situated within slave- 
holding States. Officers of the government 
might bring their slaves to Washington city, and 
take them away. The transportation of slaves, 
whether by land, river, or sea, was to be un- 
hindered. When a fugitive slave should be lost 
through the laches of an officer, or through the 
violence of a mob, the United States would pay 
the value of the slave to the owner. Although 
these propositions were in the form of five irre- 
pealable amendments to the Constitution, they 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 53 

were contemptuously rejected by the irreconcil- 
able Southern leaders. Secession was therefore 
not a defensive act ; it was an aggression. 
Thaddeus Stevens (H. R., January 29, 1861) 
plumbed the purpose in these words : — 

*' The secession and rebellion of the South have 
been inculcated as a doctrine for twenty years past 
among slaveholding communities. At one time the 
tariff was deemed a sufficient cause ; then the exclu- 
sion of slavery from free territories ; then some vio- 
lation of the fugitive slave law. Now, the culminat- 
ing cause is the election of a President who does not 
believe in the benefits of slavery, or approve of that 
great missionary enterprise, the slave trade. The 
truth is, all these things are mere pretenses. The 
restless spirits of the South desire to have a slave 
empire, and they use these things as excuses. Some 
of them desire a more brilliant and stronger govern- 
ment than a Republic. Their domestic institutions 
and the social inequality of their free people nat- 
urally prepare them for a monarchy surrounded by 
a lordly nobility, for a throne founded on the neck 
of labor." 

A war contrived for such a purpose could be 
the result only of a conspiracy, although this 



54 THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 

Statement, as applied to the Rebellion, may seem 
to be incredible, when the magnitude of that 
struggle is considered. But it should not be 
forgotten that the slaveholders were working 
with plastic material. The Southern people 
were poor, as the result of a system which dis- 
honored labor. They were confined and at- 
tached to locality, and they believed in states' 
rights. There was lack of social, mental, and 
commercial communication ; of cities, of rail- 
roads, of newspapers, of schools, and of libra- 
ries. As Emerson said of slavery in the West 
Indies, " Slavery is no scholar, no improver. It 
does not love the whistle of the locomotive ; 
it does not love the newspaper, the mailbag, 
a college, a book, or a preacher who has the 
absurd whim of saying what he thinks." The 
principal means of enlightenment were the po- 
litical speeches delivered by the slaveholders, 
whose influence as the owners of land and la- 
bor was practically government ; and the body 
of the Southern people, receiving their news 
and ideas at second-hand, came to reflect, with 
the faithfulness of a mirror, the hopes and the 
prejudices of their masters. The spirit of abo- 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE.. 55 

litionism, whenever it appeared, was exorcised 
by burning, hanging, shooting, or outlawing the 
person bewitched. As Mr. Cairnes has pointed 
out, the Southern people were the victims of 
the slave system. They were moulded to the 
invincible will of an intelligent, wealthy, uni- 
fied, and desperate minority. From the begin- 
ning to the end of the war, they were the sub- 
jects of extraordinary delusions, being practiced 
upon with all the arts of chicanery known to 
ambitious and reckless politicians. Had they 
foreseen any one of the fatal consequences of 
their revolt against the government, — the four 
years of bloody strife, the depletion of their 
resources, the sacrifice of their personal rights, 
and the establishment of a military despotism 
shortly after the beginning of hostilities, — they 
could not have been tricked into secession by 
arbitrary and unrepresentative conventions, nor 
deluded into following the phantom of state 
sovereignty. 

Promised relief from the " tyrannical usurpa- 
tion " of the national government, they were 
cajoled into selling their modicum of liberty ; 
assured of peaceful separation, they were de- 



56 THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 

frauded into the most sanguinary conflict of 
modern times. They had been taught that the 
North was peopled by a vulgar race, greedy of 
gold, and destitute of honor and courage ; while 
for the abolitionist was reserved a distinct place 
in their imaginations as the typical incarnation 
of all human villanies and vices. Him they 
hated ; but all they despised. 

Yes, they were assured, secession would be 
peaceable; revolution, holiday -making. And 
this confidence, which the leaders themselves 
partially shared, was seemingly justified by the 
aspect of affairs. 

Before Mr. Lincoln was inaugurated on the 
4th of March, 1861, secession was an accom- 
plished fact in seven of the Southern States, 
and the government had not raised its hand. 
Nay, more, the President of the United States 
had sent a message to Congress, denying the 
power of the Federal government " to coerce 
a State into submission, which is attempting 
to withdraw or has actually withdrawn from 
the Union." War had been levied against 
the United States by the seizure of national 
forts, arsenals, sub-treasuries, custom houses, 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 57 

and other property ; a United States vessel 
bearing reinforcements and provisions for Fort 
Sumter had been fired upon and driven out of 
Charleston harbor ; in pursuance of an address 
issued by thirty Congressmen to their constitu- 
ents from the capital of the nation, a provisional 
government had been organized at Montgomery, 
and a United States senator had resigned his 
seat to take the executive chair thereof. The 
treasury had been bankrupted ; the navy had 
been scattered over distant waters ; and arms 
and munitions of war in immense quantities had 
been removed to the South, where they had con- 
veniently fallen into the hands of the belliger- 
ents. Even after the installation of the new 
administration, and in the face of these overt 
acts, the government kindly consented to notify 
South Carolina in case of any attempt to change 
the military status at Sumter. 

Was the South so very wrong after all 1 The 
world looked on, and marveled. Through some 
alchemy of conscience, civil, military, and naval 
officers violated their trusts, and dishonored 
their allegiance. United States senators and 
representatives gravely argued a nation out of 



58 THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 

existence, lectured the passive North with so- 
lemnity on its shortcomings, in florid valedic- 
tories, expressive more of grief than of anger, 
drew their pay, and went South to dedicate 
"their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred 
honor " to the cause of human slavery. The 
situation recalls Carlyle's description of " a gov- 
ernment tumbling and drifting on the whirl- 
pools and mud deluges, floating atop in a con- 
spicuous manner, no whither, like the carcass 
of a drowned ass." Apparently the greatest re- 
public on earth, one which had been baptized 
in blood, had become impotent, and was about 
to die in a daze. Is it matter of surprise, then, 
that all Charleston should make high carnival of 
the bombardment of Sumter } Thus ended the 
ghastliest farce in the annals of history, and 
thus began the bloodiest of tragedies. 

But the South, once committed to error, per- 
severed in the face of defeat. Never, in an evil 
cause, did a great people fight more gallantly, 
nor endure more privations uncomplainingly. 
Spurred by the invincible spirit of their women, 
encouraged by the pious exhortations of their 
clergy, and goaded by the indomitable pride of 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE, 59 

their leaders, they fought the fight to the bitter 
end, recognizing only the remorseless fact of 
invasion, and neither reflecting on the past, nor 
speculating on the future. The star of empire 
was in its zenith. Success would have meant 
irretrievable ruin to the South. Already war- 
fare had enthroned an absolute monarch, whom 
a pleasant fiction dominated a President. Vic- 
tory would have deified him. Parliamentary gov- 
ernment existed only in name. The Confederate 
Congress, whose meetings were mostly secret, 
sank into obscurity and neglect. The brain of 
the South was done with legislating, and had 
gone to fighting. The planters, who dominated 
before the war as land and slave owners, ruled 
with yet more masterful hand as military offi- 
cers, and the people who had suffered the com- 
pulsion of drastic conscriptions, and who had 
been disciplined by army service, had become 
accustomed to yield unquestioning obedience 
to their ranking officers and to the central gov- 
ernment. The theory of states' rights, used 
as a shield to cover a century's revolutionary 
designs, early fell into disrepute, and was re- 
vived later, in all simplicity, by North Carolina, 



6o 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 



only to disappear forever before the threat of 
martial law. Throughout the South, freedom of 
speech, freedom of the press, the right of trial 
t>y ju^'y> all were gone. Independence achieved 
within the Unes of original secession, the forms 
of Republican government might have been re- 
stored. But the soul was fled, and forever. 



VIIL 

It is impossible to trace in detail the great 
servile empire which once loomed so porten- 
tously, but which now belongs to shadow land. 
Certain things, may, however, be predicated. 
The new slave State would be essentially mili- 
tary in character. Born of a sleepless antago- 
nism, it could never relinquish the sword. It 
would be isolated, contemned, and in a measure 
proscribed by the nations of the earth ; but it 
would also be feared. Their enemies humbled 
in dust and blood, the slaveholders, arrogant' 
before, would become drunk with pride. Sla- 
very vindicated by that might which makes 
right, they would proclaim her divinity to an in- 
fidel world, and would proselytize with a flaming 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 6 1 

scimitar. The Confederate legions, trained to 
victory by a great war, would be an irresistible 
army of conquest. The slave dominions would 
unfold like a fan, Maximilian's government would 
fall helplessly, even as it did fall, and the empire 
would coil itself unhindered about the Gulf of 
Mexico. Exhaustion of the soil, preservation 
against watchful enemies, and lust of power 
would steadily impel to territorial aggrandize- 
ment ; and slavery, winding its way across the 
isthmus, would "find no limit but the Southern 
ocean." Nor is this all. The depletion of the 
labor force, counter colonization schemes by 
rival powers, and a proper fealty to the '' divine 
institution " would compel also the revival of the 
foreign slave traffic, now truly a " missionary 
enterprise." Black slavers would spread their 
wings in flight, to hover, carrion-like, about the 
coasts of Africa, and communication between 
the two shores would for a time be rapid and 
constant. These conditions fulfilled, the dream 
would become reality, the slave nation empire. 
Truly, an empire ! for a slave economy never dif- 
fers from itself. A slave country cannot but be 
brutalized by its system of labor ; the govern- 



62 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 



ment of many, perhaps of the most, of its sub- 
jects is founded in force, not in consent ; laws 
are imposed rather than agreed to ; there is an 
intolerance of opinion and of peaceful arbitra- 
tion of wrongs, and a violation of human rights 
which does not halt at the color line nor at 
political boundaries. Whatever its form, what- 
ever its name, howsoever fair its beginnings, a 
slave government will degenerate into a des- 
potism, orderly or capricious, as circumstances 
may determine. If it be a warring nation, — as 
the Southern empire must have been, owing to 
the predatory habits of its free population, the 
government of conquered peoples, and the hos- 
tility of free countries, — its head would be a 
dictator. There would be factious contentions 
with and among the nobles, and intervals of 
chaos, to be followed by the advent of a Caesar, 
and by a remorseless absolutism. 

And what of the North, left by secession a 
dishonored fragment ^ Would the free States 
bind about them more closely the ties of union, 
or would the principle of union be lost "^ Would 
the States upon the Pacific coast turn away from 
the pathless desert, and look beyond the ocean 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 63 

where their hope of commerce lay? Would 
the East separate from the West, and would the 
West join with the South ? In the very heat 
of the war Vallandigham said: "There is not 
one drop of rain that falls on the whole vast ex- 
panse of the Northwest that does not find its 
home in the bosom of the Gulf. We must and 
we will follow it, with travel and trade ; not by 
treaty, but by right ; freely, peaceably ; without 
restriction or tribute, under the same govern- 
ment and flag." 

But the Mississippi could flow unvexed to the 
sea only under the black flag of slavery. Would 
commerce continue to follow the waterways, or 
would it be deflected east by artificial channels ? 
Would there be custom houses at every border, 
and standing armies to enforce a right of way 
over adjacent territory } Would there be wide- 
spread commercial panics growing out of the 
enormous waste caused by the war of the Rebel- 
lion, and by unfavorable commercial and political 
conditions ? Would new leagues or confedera- 
cies be formed which should possess the element 
of stability, or would they, too, be involved in 
strife and be torn with civil dissensions t It is 



64 THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 

not possible to measure the extent of the calam- 
ity. It might be more, or it might be less, but 
we know that it would be great. It is probable 
that freedom would still be a bond of union, that 
the States of the North, wearying of unworthy 
bickerings and petty jealousies, would gird them- 
selves for a common purpose ; that marriages 
made between free and slave States would be 
dissolved or would grow into a more perfect 
union by the elimination of slavery, and that the 
Northern idea would finally triumph, either in 
patient waiting, or in mighty conflict on blood- 
drenched fields. 

The Southern empire would probably share 
the fate of Rome in its declining days. It would 
first lose the provinces outlying on the north 
either by mihtary invasion, or, as surely, by the 
slow working of economic laws. The reopening 
of the slave trade would make slave-breeding un- 
profitable, and gradually the border States would 
fall away, subject, as they must be, to competi- 
tion, and to other modifying influences of the 
Northern industrial system. Later, the other 
Southern States would be recovered to freedom, 
either through an increasing sterility of the 



THE SOUTHERN EMPIRE. 65 

land, or through a dearth of slave labor, caused 
by the ultimate suppression of the slave trade. 
Slavery would thus owe its destruction to one 
of two processes which secession might impede, 
but which it could not defeat. The slave em- 
pire would recede slowly towards the tropics, 
giving up all its old possessions in the republic, 
withering in the North, enlarging by tumorous 
growth in the South, until finally it should be- 
come an inert mass, be drained of its vitality, 
fade into a mere geographical expression, and 
perish of inherent weakness and decay. Or, 
perchance, the end would be hastened by foreign 
intervention. The slave empire, as a political 
idea and entity, would be a defiance of the moral 
sense of the civilized world, and would excite an 
international crusade, which, beginning on the 
coasts of Africa, might lay low the very citadel. 
In any event, the slave State would be doomed, 
whether it should die of itself or by the hand of 
the executioner. All this, however, after many, 
many years ! And who can say what misery 
and disaster would be crowded into that hiatus 
of freedom ! But it is useless to multiply hypo- 
theses. Although we may not differ widely in 



66 THE SOUTHER!^ EMPIRE. 

our conclusions, our speculations are in air. We 
can only know that, a brief twenty-five years 
ago, the American Union, freighted with the best 
aspirations of humanity, narrowly escaped ship- 
wreck, and that a great storm subsided into a 
billow of half a million of graves. 



OXFORD. 



OXFORD. 



Oxford, "sweet city of dreaming spires," 
is England in miniature. It has been the seat 
of government, of learning, and of ecclesiasti- 
cal agitation. Eight centuries are reflected in 
the glories of its architecture. Its halls and 
chapels are clustered memories. 

On a clear night, when the gray of the build- 
ings is silvered by the moonlight, and the shad- 
ows of the quaint lanes of Oxford are deepen- 
ing, when " Great Tom " is 

" Swinging slow with sullen roar," 

or, perchance, the bonny Christ Church bells 
are ringing out on the still air, a ramble through 
the " quads," deserted by all save their ghostly 
effigies, and in the gardens by the battered, ivy- 
mantled walls, melts the prose of life into 
poesy, and discovers to the imaginative the ec- 
stasy of melancholy. The bells have ceased. 



70 OXFORD. 

But in yonder chapel, whose windows are fret- 
ted with majesticdl fire, the swelling tones of 
the organ and the voices of the choristers rise 
in a flood of melody that reechoes through the 
vaulted building, and with trembling cadence 
dies away in the silent night. Near are the 
cloisters, where the seed of learning was hidden 
long ago, and stealthily nourished to blossom 
out in after time into a goodly tree. 

Oxford is one of the battle grounds of human 
thought, for peace hath its victories. It has 
been the cradle and grave of opinion. Great 
names stud its books, and clothe its history 
"with the beauty of a thousand stars." It has 
perspective and atmosphere. It is a vast store- 
house of associations, and it speaks to the youth 
who throng its corridors, in various language. 
The impulses and aspirations, the intellectual 
prejudices and animosities, of each generation 
are here writ in stone, and the time-stained, yet 
time-defying walls still serenely stand to mock 
the defeated purposes of founders, and to aver- 
age the vicissitudes of thought. Oxford has al- 
ways been the mirror of the English mind, and 
all England has been the reflex of its agitations. 



OXFORD. 



71 



It was as fruitful a source of disturbance to the 
country in the past as is Moscow to Russia in 
the present. It has been the theatre of strife 
between the regular and secular clergy ; be- 
tween nominalism and realism ; between scho- 
lasticism and the new learning ; between Cathol- 
icism and Protestantism ; between the civil and 
the common law. It was the headquarters of 
Charles I. during the revolution, and was long 
the seat of Jacobitism. Methodism and Tracta- 
rianism took their rise here. Although it has 
ceased to be the focus of political life, it is still 
the seed-plot of statesmen. In literature its in- 
fluence was never so great as to-day. 

The origin of the town, which is older than 
the university, may be dated back to the first 
centuries of the era. Situated on the Thames, 
Oxford was a defensive point against the inroad- 
ing Danes, who pushed their way into the heart 
of England by the rivers, and was one of the 
most important of English boroughs. Then, as 
afterwards, it was the seat of the national coun- 
cils, and a place of royal residence. It suffered 
severely in the Conquest, and shortly thereafter 
Oxford Castle was built by Robert D'Oigli, to 



'J2 OXFORD. 

whose tender mercies Oxfordshire had been 
committed by William the Conqueror. It was 
from this castle, on the night before its capitula- 
tion to King Stephen, that the Empress Maud 
fled over the snow and ice to Abingdon, clad 
in robes of white, and accompanied by three 
knights-of-arms. 

PubHc teaching followed hard upon the Con- 
quest, and was probably due to it, although 
before that time many scholars resided here. 
Learning naturally crystallized about the monas- 
teries, and the Priory of St. Prides wide was per- 
haps the magnet which originally attracted the 
students. If this conjecture be wise, then the 
rise of the University of Oxford, like that of Sa- 
lernum, the first of the universities of the Mid- 
dle Ages, belongs to the great cenobite Order of 
St. Benedict. The admirable zeal of this order 
for the diffusion of secular learning has been 
attributed to the simplicity of its '* knowingly 
unknowing and wisely unlearned " head, who, in 
enjoining his followers to collect books, forgot 
that all writings are not religious, and so, hap- 
pily, proscribed none. After a while the Bene- 
dictine monks were displaced from St. Prides- 



OXFORD. 73 

wide by the Augustinian canons, whose school 
became famous for its disputations or *' Aus- 
tins." And then came the Black and the Gray 
and the White Friars, with whom the univer- 
sity, when fully grown, waged war ceaselessly. 
The religious houses in Oxford belonging to 
the Abbeys of Abingdon and Eynsham should 
be mentioned in connection with the claustral 
schools of St. Frideswide as among the sources 
of the university. The story that Alfred 
founded this great seat of learning is impos- 
ing, but apocryphal. The name of the uni- 
versity is not mentioned in history before the 
Norman Conquest. The impulse to learning in 
Great Britain seems first to have come from Ire- 
land, whose missionaries founded many monas- 
teries. In the eighth and ninth centuries the 
most important place of teaching in England was 
the cathedral school at York, whither flocked 
the youth who had exhausted the capacity of 
lesser schools. To monastic institutions the 
world owes something. At the Abbey of 
Whitby, " the Westminster of Northumbrian 
kings," where the Roman and Irish churches 
had their fateful trial, Caedmon caught the in- 



74 OXFORD. 

spiration of his song. The monastery of Jarrow 
was the hermitage of Baeda, the father of Eng- 
hsh history and learning. Dunstan was born 
near the monastery of Glastonbury, and after- 
wards became its abbot. Lanfranc and An- 
selm successively taught in the famous and 
fruitful Abbey of Bee. Macaulay compares the 
church with the ark, riding alone, " amidst 
darkness and tempest, on the deluge beneath 
which all the great works of ancient power and 
wisdom lay entombed, bearing within her that 
feeble germ from which a second and more glo- 
rious civilization was to spring." The services 
of the church are undoubted, and the figure is 
fine. But in justice it must be said that the 
church destroyed more manuscripts than she 
saved, and that the preservation of classical 
learning is due almost wholly to the cultivated 
tastes of the infidel Arab and Jew. When 
Latin became a dead language, all that was 
left of literature in the west was buried with 
it. It augured well, therefore, that the church, 
which dislikes innovation, should retain this 
language as a common vehicle of communica- 
tion between the various countries of Europe. 



OXFORD, 7S 

But unfortunately the churchmen, who were the 
only learned men, were exclusively devotional. 
'' Literature became religious, and, being reli- 
gious, ceased to be literature." The church 
councils forbade the reading of pagan and secu- 
lar books ; taste declined ; the classic models 
themselves were lost, owing to the scarcity of 
manuscripts, the indifference of custodians, and 
the absence of printing ; and the love of learn- 
ing became extinct. The Romano - Hellenic 
schools withered under imperial patronage and 
other influences, and western Europe fell into 
intellectual torpor, from which it was not fully 
aroused until the Protestant Reformation. There 
was a revival by Charlemagne, but it was short- 
lived. He established a palace school, and en- 
deavored to raise the standard of teaching in 
the monasteries, those feeble survivals of the 
Romano - Hellenic schools. Half a century 
later, Alfred founded a palace school in England. 
But his work did not endure. He himself said 
that he knew of no priests south of the Thames 
who understood the meaning of the Latin 
prayers they used. In fact, the church was in a 
state of hopeless and sodden ignorance. Even 



^6 OXFORD. 

the very bishops were illiterate. Such instruc- 
tion as was given by the monasteries was sadly 
deficient in quantity and quality. These schools 
affected to teach the seven liberal arts of the 
Romano-Hellenic schools ; the ancient trivium, 
consisting of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics, 
and the quadrivium, consisting of music, arith- 
metic, geometry, and astronomy. According to 
the monkish distich, — 

" Gramm. loquitur, Dia. vera docet, Rhet. verba colorat : 
Mus. canit, Ar. numerat, Geo. ponderat, Ast. colit astra." 

But in truth they did little of the sort. The 
arithmetic of Cassiodorus, the text-book com- 
monly used, consisted of less than three folio 
pages. Grammar and rhetoric were scarcely 
more pretentious. Geometry was a crude out- 
line. Music was reduced to church chants, and 
astronomy was limited to the calculation of 
Easter and festival days. Boys were taught to 
read and write, merely that they might study 
the Bible, and multiply copies of it. The object 
of education was purely religious, and temporali- 
ties were neglected. The world was to end in 
the year looo. From the sixth century to the 
eleventh century, only two names, in the opinion 



OXFORD. 77 

of HaHam> are worthy of mention by the his- 
torian : Scotus Erigena, a student of Greek, who 
translated the pseudo-Dionysian writings, and 
who evolved a complete, though mystical system 
of philosophy ; and Pope Silvester II., who was 
deeply educated in the Moorish schools, and who 
gained the papal chair — the voice of supersti- 
tion whispered — through the intervention of 
the devil. 

But with the twelfth century came the dawn. 
The rise of universities was only a part of 
a widespread movement, political and moral, 
which, to quote the compact statement of 
Laurie, showed itself " in the Order of Chivalry, 
in the Crusades, the rise of free towns, the in- 
corporation of civic life, the organization of 
industries in the form of guilds, and, we may 
also add as another indication of the mental 
quickening, in the rise of a Provengal modern 
language and literature, and not a few heresies." 

The cathedral and monastic schools, which 
were the only centres of learning in Europe, 
were the germs of the universities of the Middle 
Ages. These universities were a growth, and 
not a creation. They arose out of and grew up 



78 OXFORD. 

about the monasteries, which contained schools 
of two kinds : the inner or claustral school, re- 
served for the oblatiy or those who intended to 
devote themselves to a monastic life, and the 
outer school, open to the clerici generally. At 
certain places, such as Oxford and Cambridge in 
England, and at Paris on the Continent, the 
attendance at these schools exceeded the limits 
of the monasteries, and there was an overflow 
of students into boarding halls or schools which 
were opened in the neighborhood by graduates, 
or by itinerant teachers. In Oxford, in the 
thirteenth century, there were more than seventy 
of these halls. Gradually the students freed 
themselves from monastic control, and formed 
learned communities of their own. They elected 
masters, prescribed their own government, and 
assumed sole jurisdiction of offenses committed 
by any of themselves. They became literary 
republics, independent of civic, civil, and papal 
power, the privileges which they assumed being 
formally recognized by letters patent or by papal 
decree. When their freedom was threatened by 
the covetousness of the municipality, the crown, 
or the Pope, they would jealously guard their 



OXFORD. 79 

own rights by playing off these powers against 
each other. 

In the Middle Ages the term " universitas " 
implied no universality of study, nor indeed did 
it refer to it. The word meant " community," 
and was applied to any corporation, municipality, 
or guild. What we call a " university " was then 
known as a universitas literaria (learned com- 
munity), which might contain subordinate tmiver- 
sitates based upon nationality or upon a course 
of study. A universitas literaria^ or a studium 
generate, as it was sometimes designated, was a 
privileged, self-governing school, which had spe- 
cialized one or more studies, and which was open 
to all comers from any part of the world.^ Thus, 
the arts' school at Salernum became a university 
when medicine was specialized by Constantinus, 
a great traveler who had translated many medi- 
cal works from the Arabic. Students of various 
races and nations gathered here, where instruc- 
tion was given in four languages, Greek, Arabic, 
Hebrew, and Latin, and where a licentia medendi, 
or license to practice the healing art, was con- 
ferred. Without the Saracenic influence which 

1 Vide Laurie's Rise and Constitution of Universities, Caput X. 



80 OXFORD. 

led to the study of the liberal arts in Europe, 
the university movement would have been long 
deferred. The academies, universities, and libra- 
ries at Bagdad, Cairo, Cordova, Granada, and 
Seville were magnificent and famous, and were 
the resort of many students from the north, 
even from Oxford and Cambridge. Every li- 
brary had its translators, and thus much of 
Greek literature was saved to us. At Bologna, 
Irnerius created a university by specializing the 
Roman law, and the beneficial influence of this 
revival it would be difficult to exaggerate. The 
new municipal and trade corporations, which 
had formed a cordon about feudalism, were 
seeking a definition of their property rights ac- 
cording to some coherent legal system, and 
while the Roman law was not considered favor- 
able to political liberty, it was in other re- 
spects an admirable instrument of justice. 
Whatever its defects, its scientific precision 
was at least invaluable as a method. But in 
England it had a rival in the common law, 
which, though sometimes crude in its judgments 
and harsh in its penalties, was strong where the 
Roman law was weak. In 1149, Vacarius, of the 



OXFORD. 8 1 

university of Bologna, expounded the Roman 
law in Oxford, and this was the beginning of 
the strife between the two systems of juris- 
prudence. Vacarius was forbidden by King 
Stephen to continue his lectures, and after- 
wards the Parliament of Merton declared the 
immutability of the laws of England. But the 
civil law found an ally in the church. The 
political absolutism which tainted the Roman 
system was congenial to the priestly hierarchy, 
and the civil and canon laws soon became inter- 
woven. The church objected to the common 
law because it was founded in the customs of 
the laity and not in the imperial constitutions. 
But the nobility and the people of England 
clung tenaciously to their own. Finally, in the 
reign of King Henry III., the church acknow- 
ledged defeat, by compelling the clergy to with- 
draw from the secular courts, where they alone 
were serving as the judges and the advocates. 
The civil law maintained its foothold in England 
only in the ecclesiastical courts, in the chancel- 
lors' courts of the universities, and in the High 
Court of Chancery. Students of the common 
law, thus excluded from Oxford and Cambridge, 



82 OXFORD. 

founded a seminary of their own at London, 
under the name of the Inns of Court and of 
Chancery, which flourished under the protection 
of the crown, and which to-day is the only portal 
of admission to the English bar. 

Oxford must have attained much prominence 
as a seat of learning in the twelfth century to 
have attracted Vacarius from Italy. Universities 
had arisen over all western Europe, and, saving 
the University of Paris, Oxford was the most 
celebrated of them. Although there were few 
facilities of communication between these insti- 
tutions which lay so widely apart, passionate 
devotees of learning, attracted by the fame of 
some great teacher, would find their way, on* 
foot, from one place to another, many of them 
begging as they went. They gathered in thou- 
sands at the various universities, notably at 
Paris, at Bologna, at Oxford, and at Cambridge, 
where they divided into groups according to 
their political allegiance. The "nations" thus 
formed were a remarkable feature of university 
life in the Middle Ages, and were a fertile cause 
of strife. At Paris there were four nations, the 
Picard, the Norman, the French, — which in- 



OXFORD. '61 

eluded Italians, Spaniards, Greeks, and Orien- 
tals, — and the English, which embraced the 
Enghsh, Irish, Germans, Poles, and all others 
from the north of Europe. Each nation was in- 
dependent, and exercised supervision of its own 
students and their lodging-houses. At Bologna 
the eighteen nations who represented countries 
north of the Alps coalesced into the tmiversitas 
citramoiit alio rum y and the seventeen southern 
nations formed the tmiversitas ultrani07tianortim. 
Each nation elected a consiliarius, and the col- 
lective consiliarii of each tmiversitas elected a 
rector. The government of the universities dif- 
fered in detail, but the constitution of all of 
them was fundamentally democratic. The uni- 
versities were distinct entities, claiming and 
obtaining sovereign rights. Bulls beneficial to 
them were frequently issued by the Popes, 
heresy being neither suspected nor dreaded. 
The privileges conferred by the crown upon the 
students included exemption from taxes, from 
military service, and from the jurisdiction of 
ordinary tribunals. The right to elect a rector 
was a custom shared by the trade guilds, and 
the immunity from civic authority was perhaps 



84 OXFORD. 

an extension of the right of benefit of clergy. 
Inasmuch as the universities of the Middle 
Ages owned no permanent buildings, and were 
possessed only of movable property, the stu- 
dents could keep the towns and the doctors in 
a state of subjection by threats of migration, 
and these threats were not idle. 

Disputes at the University of Bologna led to 
the establishment of the University of Vicenza 
in 1204, and that of Padua in 1222. In Paris, 
owing to the youth of the students, many of 
whom attended the Notre Dame arts* school, 
out of which the university arose, the masters 
shared in the government. In Oxford there 
were two nations, the North and the South, and 
one procurator or proctor was chosen to repre- 
sent each. Originally, the proctors were elected 
by the regenteSy or teaching masters, who, in 
early times, constituted the sole legislature of 
the university. Afterwards, they were chosen by 
the whole body of the regentes and noit-regentes. 
Chiefly, their duty was to keep the peace, and 
their authority extended even to the impeach- 
ment of the chancellor. Anciently, the chan- 
cellor was nominated by the Bishop of Lincoln, 



OXFORD. ^5 

in whose see the town of Oxford lay ; the 
church claiming jurisdiction of the university. 
Later, the convocation assumed the nominatmg 
power, subject, perhaps, to diocesan confirma- 
tion. To-day, the chancellor is but the nominal 
head of the university, and is a non-resident. 
His duties have devolved upon the vice-chan- 
cellor, who is elected biennially from a cycle 
composed of the heads of colleges. At Prague, 
a reorganization of the nations which gave the 
preponderance of power to the Slavs caused an 
emigration of the German teachers and pupils 
to Vienna, Erfurt, Heidelberg, and Leipsic. Thus 
began the German university system. In Pans, 
in 1 22 1, a Town and Gown riot occurred, and, 
as Queen Blanche and the bishop favored the 
Town, certain students were expelled. The 
provost attacked the students at their games, 
and slew some who had not participated in the 
riot. Thereupon a large number of masters and 
pupils left Paris for Orleans, Toulouse, and Ox- 
ford. It was only after this secession that 
Oxford ceased to be an arts' school, and be- 
came a university. It, too, suffered from three 
secessions within a century, — to Reading, to 



86 OXFORD. 

Northampton, and to Stamford, — but it sur- 
vived them all. The cause of the secession to 
Northampton has been referred to the rebel- 
lion of the sturdy Earl Simon, who held his par- 
liament in Oxford, and with whom the north- 
ern students sided. But an excuse for strife 
was never lacking. The times were troublous, 
and full of sleepless feuds. Gown was noisy, 
lawless, and supercilious, and Town smote Gown 
whenever chance offered. On St. Scholastica's 
day, February lo, 1354(5), there was a bloody 
fray, in which the Town was reinforced by the 
Country. *' Slea, slea ! havock, havock ! smyt 
fast ! give gode knocks ! " was the battle-cry. 
Fourteen halls were plundered, forty scholars 
were killed, and the university was left deserted. 
For this grievous deed the town was laid under 
interdict by the bishop, and was shorn of many 
of its privileges by the crown. The assize of 
bread and wine and the supervision of weights 
and measures were taken from it, and were in- 
vested in the university. Nor did the humilia- 
tion end here. For nearly five centuries there- 
after, by a decree of the king, the mayor, the 
bailiffs, and sixty leading citizens were obliged 



OXFORD. Zy 

to attend mass in St. Mary's, the university 
church, on each anniversary of St. Scholastica's 
day, and there to offer at the high altar one 
penny each (a goodly sum then), of which two 
thirds were to be distributed at once among the 
poor scholars. 

In the Middle Ages, Oxford was a walled 
town, extending one half mile one way and one 
fourth of a mile another, and within this area 
it is said that twenty thousand students were 
crowded. This number is largely overstated, 
although it is probable that the attendance in 
the time of Roger Bacon was much greater than 
it is now. The monasteries and cathedral schools 
were being deserted for the universities, even 
cooks and servitors were enrolled, and many 
young scholars attended the grammar schools 
at Oxford, as the licenses for "fetchers" and 
" bringers " indicate. Chaucer, in his delicious 
verse, gives us a contemporary portrait of the 
Oxford student of those days : — 

" A clerk ther was of Oxenford also, 
That unto logik hadde longe i-go. 
As lene was his hors as is a rake, 
And he was not right fat, I undertake ; 



88 OXFORD. 

But lokede holwe, and therto soberly. 

Ful thredbar was his overest courtepy. 

For he hadde geten him yit no benefice, 

Ne was so worldly for to have office. 

For him was levere have at his beddes heede 

Twenty bookes, clad in blak or reede, 

Of Aristotle and his philosophye, 

Then robes riche, or fithele, or gay sawtrye. 

But al be that he was a philosophre, 

Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre ; 

But al that he mighte of his freddes hente, 

On bookes and on lernyng he it spente, 

And busily gan for the soules preye 

Of hem that yaf him wherwith to scoleye ; 

Of studie took he most cure and most heede. 

Not oo word spak he more than was neede, 

And that was seid in forme and reverence 

And schort and quyk, and ful of high sentence. 

Sownynge in moral vertu was his speche, 

And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche." 

Within the walls was a seething mass of tem- 
pestuous life. There were thousands of boys 
huddled in bare lodging-houses, *' clustering 
around teachers as poor as themselves in church- 
porch and house-porch, drinking, quarreling, 
dicing, begging at the corners of the streets. . . . 
Scholars from Kent and scholars from Scotland 
wage the bitter struggle of South and North. 



OXFORD. 89 

At nightfall roysterer and reveler roam with 
torches through the narrow lanes, defying bailiff s, 
and cutting down burghers at their doors. Now 
a mob of clerks plunges into the Jewry, and wipes 
off the memory of bills and bonds by sacking a 
Hebrew house or two. Now a tavern row be- 
tween scholar and townsman widens into a gen- 
eral broil, and the academical bell of St. Mary's 
vies with the town bell of St. Martin's in clang- 
ing to arms. Every phase of ecclesiastical con- 
troversy and political strife is preluded by some 
fierce outbreak in this turbulent surging mob. 
When England growls at the exactions of the 
Papacy, the students besiege a legate in the 
abbot's house at Osney. A murderous Town 
and Gown row precedes the opening of the 
Barons' War. 'When Oxford draws knife,' runs 
the old rhyme, '■ England 's soon at strife.' " ^ 

With the advent of the collegiate system the 
brawls became less frequent. Decency and order 
were enforced, and the unattached students or 
" chamberdeykins," the leaders in lawlessness, 
were suppressed by statute. But this was not 
all of the reform. The colleges superseded the 

1 Green's Short History of the English People, pp. 158, 159. 



90 OXFORD. 

religious houses, which, in the early days of the 
university, were the most spacious and comfort- 
able buildings in Oxford. Gradually, too, the 
number of licensed halls diminished, until now 
but few remain. Then, as now, the university 
was a distinct corporation, which included the 
colleges and halls but was not included by them, 
and it is possible to-day (by recent enactment), 
as it was in the days of the chamberdeykins, to 
be an unattached member of the university. 

Merton College, founded by Walter de Mer- 
ton, in 1264, was the first college structure 
erected in Oxford, and was the model of the 
English college system. The statutes drawn by 
the founder were characterized by such wisdom 
and foresight that they remained practically un- 
altered during seven centuries. Merton's object 
was anti-monastic, the cultivation of lay learning, 
and the upbuilding of a secular class. Although 
the discipline prescribed was severe, and ascetic 
in character, the students were forbidden ever 
to take vows, and were required to study phi- 
losophy and the liberal arts before beginning 
theology. Merton, in projecting his college, 
is said to have had in mind the Sorbonne, a 



OXFORD. 9t 

college of the University of Paris, founded by 
the chaplain of Louis IX. fourteen years be- 
fore. In Oxford, two colleges besides Merton 
were established in the thirteenth century, Uni- 
versity and Balliol, and thereafter colleges ap- 
peared at irregular intervals, averaging about 
one to every generation. 

Balliol College owes its foundation to a woman. 
About 1260, John Balliol, son of the King of 
Scotland of that name, made certain payments 
for the support of poor students at Oxford, but 
it remained for his widow. Lady De Vorguilla, 
to execute the trust by organizing, in 1282, 
"The House of the Scholars of Balliol." In 
her charter deed Lady De Vorguilla conceded 
the principle of self-government, and refused to 
place legal restrictions upon elections to the 
foundation. Although established by a Scot, 
the college was not restricted to the Scotch, 
and, contrary to the custom of the times, it was 
not made the mere appanage of any district, 
abbey, or institution. It was open to the world. 
De Vorguilla's object, like that of Walter De 
Merton, was to found a home for secular learn- 
ing, and, in the case of Balliol, divinity was not 



92 



OXFORD. 



even taught in the institution until the four- 
teenth century. The foundation may, there- 
fore, be regarded as a protest against the exclu- 
sive ecclesiasticism of the times. 

The most notable creation of the fourteenth 
century was New College, the benefaction of 
William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester. 
He had been the architect of Windsor Castle, 
and he did not fail to impress his art upon the 
walls of his Oxford foundation. New College 
obtained its name because it was a revelation to 
the college world of comfort, convenience, and 
architectural beauty. The spacious cloisters, 
the lofty tower, and the noble chapel are en- 
shrined in gardens of exquisite beauty, whose 
*' sweet, sacred, stately seclusion " afford a refuge 
to the musing scholar and the dreaming poet. 

The colleges justified the expectations of their 
creators in developing nearly all of the men 
who gave distinction to the university. When 
scholasticism reached its second stage, in the 
translation of the works of Aristotle into Latin, 
Oxford gained fame for subtle disputation, and 
became preeminent among the educational insti- 
tutions of the Western world. Anthony Wood, 



OXFORD. 93 

an historian of Oxford, who flourished four cen- 
turies ago, asks, with the pride of an ardent 
lover, *' What university, I pray, can produce an 
invincible Hales, an admirable Bacon, an excel- 
lent, well-grounded Middleton, a subtle Scotus, 
an approved Burley, a resolute Baconthorpe, a 
singular Ockham, a solid and industrious Hol- 
cot, and a profound Bradwardin ? all of which 
persons flourished within the compass of one 
century. I doubt that neither Paris, Bologna, 
nor Rome, that grand mistress of the Christian 
world, nor any place else, can do what the re- 
nowned Bellosite (Oxford) hath done." 

Now was the golden age of the universities, 
the heralds of the coming day. Knowing no 
race, nor creed, nor country, they formed a cos- 
mopolitan league of learning that threatened the 
isolation of feudalism. Rich and poor, noble 
and peasant. Christian and infidel, Aryan and 
Semite, stood upon a level. There was but one 
aristocracy, that of the intellect. Truly a grand 
epoch, and a fine ideal for so long ago, that 
promised great things for the future. But, alas ! 
the votaries of learning were to go through an 
ordeal of fire, sweat, blood, and agony before 



94 OXFORD. 

they should come into undisputed possession of 
their realm. 

The first scholar to earn the rebuke of the 
church, was Scotus Erigena, who revived the 
Platonic theory of Universals (with an infusion 
of AristoteUanism). He was accused of pan- 
theism, which was the legitimate outcome of his 
realism. Two centuries later, the discussion was 
begun anew by Roscelin and Anselm, nominalist 
and realist respectively, and thereafter it raged 
violently in the schools for three hundred years. 
Roscelin's advocacy of nominalism or individual- 
ism led him to deny the doctrine of the Trinity, 
and for this he was summoned before the Coun- 
cil of Soissons, where he was forced to recant. 
His pupil, Abelard, who took a via media be- 
tween realism and nominalism, signally discom- 
fited William of Champeaux, at Paris, and ruled 
in his stead at the university. His lectures at- 
tracted thousands of students, including many 
from Oxford. In combating the anti-Trinita- 
rian views of Roscelin, he himself fell under the 
ban of the church council ; nor was this the 
sum of his offending. His book, '' Sic et Non," 
a compilation of the antinomies of the Fathers, 



OXFORD, 95 

was regarded as an heretical attempt to apply 
logic to theology. When Abelard forsook Paris 
for a desert place in Champagne, he took the 
most of the university with him ; nor, indeed, 
could he rest there. But everywhere multitudes 
heard him, for in • those days students were 
eager. Abelard knew little of the works of 
Aristotle, which were transmitted to Europe at 
last through the helping hands of Nestorians, 
Arabs, and Jews. Hales, the Doctor Invincible 
of Oxford, was the first schoolman acquainted 
with all of them, and Grostete, also of Oxford, 
was among the first to expound them from the 
original Greek. Aristotle was accepted by a 
protesting church as a logician, and afterwards, 
even more reluctantly, as a metaphysician. In 
1209, a synod held in Paris ordered his meta- 
physical volumes to be burned. 

In vain, however. Thomas Aquinas, the An- 
gelic Doctor, and the mendicant orders suc- 
ceeded in Aristotelianizing the church. The 
Thomists, who included the Dominicans and 
Augustinians, and the Scotists or Franciscans, 
warred bitterly with each other over metaphysical 
niceties, even as did the Jansenists and Jesuits 



96 OXFORD. 

of later days. The Scotists favored free will, 
the Thomists a moderate determinism ; the quid- 
ditas or '' whatness " and the Jiaecceitas or " this- 
ness " of the individual, which became involved 
in the problem of universals, were also the sub- 
jects of heated controversy. Duns Scotus, who 
was a pupil of Merton College, Oxford, and a 
Franciscan, won the title of Siibtilis, it is said, 
by refuting nearly two hundred objections which 
were urged by the Thomists against the doctrine 
of the Immaculate Conception. Under his in- 
fluence the University of Paris formally disap- 
proved the position taken by his opponents. 

Next, out of Oxford, came William of Ockham, 
the pupil and rival of Duns Scotus, and the 
greatest of the scholastics. To him belongs the 
honor practically of ending the discussion of the 
question of universals, now nearly seventeen 
hundred years old, and seemingly everlasting. 
He maintained that universals (general ideas or 
abstractions) had no objective existence {ante 
rem or extra animam)^ but were only in mente. 
*' Ockham's razor " — ** Entia non stint multipli- 
canda prcEter necessitates " — was a protest 
against the purely deductive mental processes 



OXFORD. 97 

of the scholastics. You cannot derive the indi- 
vidual from the universal. You must begin 
with the singular and rise to the general. His 
writings breathed the spirit of induction, the 
acceptance of which was the beginning of the 
modern world. Ockham opposed that perfect 
representative of scholasticism, Thomas Aquinas, 
by proclaiming the divorce of theology and phi- 
losophy. In several things he anticipated Wyc- 
liffe. He attacked the temporal sovereignty of 
the Pope, and pleaded for the independence of 
the crown. He inveighed against the luxury 
of the Franciscans, combating the opinions of 
Pope John XXH. (he whose simony Dante con- 
demned through the mouth of St. Peter in the 
Paradiso) at a time when the University of Paris 
was cringing to obtain his patronage. Ockham 
was tried for heresy, and was imprisoned by the 
Pope at Avignon for seventeen weeks, whence 
he escaped to Munich. In 1339, his works were 
condemned by the University of Paris, but time 
vindicated him in the acceptance of the doctrine 
of nominalism as an orthodox tenet. 

Ockham had sounded the death knell of 
scholasticism. That system failed because it 



98 OXFORD. 

had ignored induction and had endeavored to 
arrive at truth by internal light alone. It 
rendered a service in teaching the human mind 
to reason acutely from given premises, but the 
value of this service must be estimated mod- 
erately. The world has not gone wrong so much 
because of illogical reasoning as because the 
data upon which that reasoning was based have 
been false or insufficient, and therefore mislead- 
ing. The scholastics chose premises to which 
it was not possible to apply the test of reason. 
All things seem to have been equally probable 
in an age whose mental characteristics were 
astrology, magic, alchemy, Neoplatonism, the 
patristic writings, and Aristotelianism. The 
schoolmen *' tied and untied the same knot, and 
formed and dissipated the same cloud," debat- 
ing propositions for whose terms there were no 
corresponding ideas. In the latter days of scho- 
lasticism some frivolous and silly questions were 
asked and discussed : Can one angel occupy 
two places, or can two angels occupy one place 
at the same time 1 Was the head formed for 
the brain or for the eye .-* Has a rat, which has 
eaten of the Host, thereby partaken of Christ's 



OXFORD. 99 

body ? Fanciful coincidences, such as that of 
the two horns of the beetle and of the moon, 
were treated as relations. The inherent weak- 
ness of the schoolmen was their ignorance of 
the laws of evidence, which, preferring a natural 
to a strained or mystical explanation of phe- 
nomona, were first practically applied in Europe 
by the medical and legal professions. 

Scholastic philosophy lingered long because it 
satisfied the taste for contention, and it served 
at least two ends : it 'sharpened the tools of 
thought by endowing the vulgar languages with 
" precision and analytic subtlety," and it inaugu- 
rated the age of discussion. It found an arena 
in the universities where teaching and dispu- 
tation were public and oral. Knowledge was 
meagre, although there was much love of it, and 
progress was small because the refinements of 
theology absorbed the attention of the subtlest 
minds^ The only intellectual career lay in or 
through the church, and theology offered the 
highest rewards. Those who devoted themselves 
to it used as text-books the '* Sentences " of 
Peter the Lombard, and the ** Summa " of Aqui- 
nas. Those who followed the law studied Jus- 



lOO OXFORD. 

tinian and Gratian ; while in medicine, Galen 
and Hippocrates were the chief authorities. 

In mathematics, Roger Bacon complained that 
few pupils crossed the pons asinonmi of Euclid, 
and this was true for long afterwards. He said 
also that he could communicate in a half year to 
any intelligent person what it had cost him forty 
years to acquire ; and this was, perhaps, less a 
reflection upon the methods of teaching in vogue, 
than upon the pitiful lack of knowledge. Edu- 
cation was gained under immense disadvantages 
in those days. There was no university press 
which could print and bind the whole Bible in 
twelve hours. There was not even a translation 
of the Bible. Manuscripts were brought from 
afar, and were precious in their rarity. One can- 
not listen without a pang to Bacon's wail for 
mathematical instruments, astronomical tables, 
and books. 

The scarcity of manuscripts has been consid- 
ered an effect of ignorance as well as a cause, 
and it has been intimated that the monks were 
not so actively employed in copying as has 
been supposed. After the conquest of Egypt by 
the Saracens, the exportation of papyri ceased. 



OXFORD. 10 [ 

Writing material became very costly, and valu- 
able books were lost to posterity through era- 
sures for new writings. Many monasteries pos- 
sessed only one missal. The Countess of Anjou 
paid for a copy of the Homilies of Haimon, 
Bishop of Halberstadt, two hundred sheep, five 
quarters of wheat, and the same of rye and millet. 
To a later and unregenerate generation the 
price seems high. Louis XL could not borrow 
a work of Rasis, the Arabian physician, from 
the Faculty of Medicine of Paris without pledg- 
ing a good deal of plate, and without getting a 
nobleman to go his surety for a large amount. 
From this it may be inferred either that books 
were rare and dear, or that the faculty knew the 
king. From the Jews of Oxford, Roger Bacon 
obtained manuscripts which helped him in his 
scientific researches. The life of this man, the 
pioneer of experimental science and exponent 
of induction, was long and troubled. Greeted 
as Doctor Mirabilis in Paris, he- returned to 
Oxford and joined the Franciscans. Here he 
was accused of practicing the black arts, and 
was interdicted from lecturing by the general of 
his order. A ban was placed upon his writings, 



I02 OXFORD. 

and he was sent back to Paris, where he re- 
mained under strict religious surveillance for 
ten years. At last, Guy de Folques, a church- 
man of culture, ascended the papal chair. He 
ordered Bacon to write a treatise for him upon 
the sciences. This was the long-sought oppor- 
tunity, and Bacon was eager to grasp it. But 
he had spent his whole fortune and that of his 
family, in his scientific investigations, and was 
impoverished. Finally, his friends came to his 
rescue by pawning their goods, and he set to 
work with such vigor that in eighteen months 
he completed, under extraordinary difficulties, 
the Opera Majus, Minus, and Tertium. These 
he forwarded to the Pope by a trusty messen- 
ger, but it is not certain that he received a 
reply. Some years after, in consequence of 
having written a protest against clerical vices 
and ignorance, he was thrown into prison, where 
he was confined for fourteen years. Shortly 
after his release he died, with these pathetic 
words upon his lips : " I repent now that I 
have given myself so much trouble for the love 
of science." 

When Bacon was at Oxford, he used as a lab- 



OXFORD. 103 

oratory and observatory a pharos of Stephen, 
erected on Folly Bridge. This tower was re- 
moved in 1779, an act of vandalism which evoked 
the following verses : — 

" Roger, if, with thy magic glasses 
Kenning, thou seest below what passes, 
As when on earth thou didst descry 
"With them the wonders of the sky; 
Look down on your devoted walls, 
Oh, save them, ere thy study falls. 
Or to thy votaries quick impart 
The secret of thy magic art ; 
Teach us, ere learning 's quite forsaken. 
To honor thee and — save our Bacon." 

The past has an irresistible charm. Its de- 
fects are hidden by a poetic haze. It is certain, 
however, that mediaeval Oxford could not have 
been very inviting. The streets were unpaved 
and almost unlighted. The ways were narrow 
and the traffic dangerous. Candles were too 
costly to use, and men could not read by rush- 
lights. In consequence, the day began and 
ended with the coming and going of the sun. 
"There was an absence of all due means of 
cleanliness and health. . . . The dining halls 
were strewn with rushes, into which all sorts of 



104 OXFORD. 

nastiness were thrown. After about a fortnight 
they became unendurable ; and there was, or 
ought to have been, a general cleaning. The 
sweating sickness of Tudor times, like other 
plagues, was largely due to the filthy mode of 
living." 1 

It is not surprising that Oxford was scourged 
frequently with pestilence, and that plays were 
forbidden as attracting crowds who spread infec- 
tion. When Edward III. was a prince and a 
pupil in Balliol College, Oxford, he was attacked 
by the small-pox. Doctor Gaddesden of Merton 
College, who attended him, recommends the fol- 
lowing treatment : " Cause the whole of the 
body of your patient to be wrapped in red scar- 
let cloth, or any other red cloth. Command 
everything about the bed to be made red. This 
is an excellent cure." Red, as resembling the 
color of the blood, was invested with high cura- 
tive powers, according to a doctrine of analogies 
which prescribed eye-bright for diseases of the 
eye. Bodily ills were supposed often to be the 
result of daemonic visitation, and to call for 
ecclesiastical remedies. Hence the favor ac- 

1 Historic Town Series : Boase's Oxford, p. 6o. 



OXFORD. '"^S 

corded to shrine, miracle, and relic cures. St. 
Valentine cured epilepsy ; St. Gervasius, rheu- 
matism ; St. Judas, coughs; St. Ovidius. deaf- 
ness; St. Hubert, hydrophobia. One method 
of expelling the demons was to make the human 
body uninhabitable by the taking of loathsome 
mixtures, such as garlic, fennel, livers of toads, 
blood of rats, fibres of the.hangman's rope, etc. 
But generally material remedies were disap- 
proved by the church. Three councils in the 
twelfth century warned churchmen against hav- 
ing anything to do with the profession of medi- 
cine, and in the thirteenth century Pope Innocent 
III. commanded physicians to call in ecclesias- 
tical advice in all cases. The University of 
Salernum was regarded with suspicion, although 
even there saintly relics as well as medicine 
were relied upon to heal the sick. It was the 
acre of magic. The doctrine of resurrection for- 
blde dissection, and surgery was impious as 
involving bodily dismemberment. In Oxford, 
so late as the time of James II., many people 
were touched for the king's evil; but it is 
pleasant to record that, long before, the hard- 
headed Queen Elizabeth was skeptical as to the 



I06 OXFORD. 

efficacy of her powers, despite fervid assurances 
given to her by her chaplain. Charles IL, it is 
said, touched nearly one hundred thousand per- 
sons. 

In the fourteenth century there appeared in 
Oxford a man who was to take up the work of 
Ockham and Bacon, and to earn for himself the 
proud distinction of the first Protestant, — John 
Wycliffe. He attacked the citadel of ecclesias- 
ticism itself. He proclaimed the innocence of 
honest error ; he denied the headship of the 
Roman Church, the supremacy of St. Peter as 
compared with the other apostles, and the tem- 
poral sovereignty of the Pope. He disliked the 
friars, because, he said, they were the emissaries 
of a power across the seas; and he mocked 
their gluttony by establishing a fraternity of 
poor priests, who went everywhere to preach 
and to pray among the lowly. It would proba- 
bly have gone hardly with Wycliffe, had not the 
church at this time made a demand for the 
papal tribute, which had been in arrears for 
thirty-three years. This demand the king and 
Parliament refused to meet, and Wycliffe was 
asked to publicly defend the position taken. He 



OXFORD. 107 

maintained the supremacy of the king and Par- 
liament over ecclesiastics as well as civihans, — 
a revolutionary doctrine which gained wide sup- 
port by reason of a well-founded belief that the 
papacy at Avignon was aiding the French king 
in his wars against England with money sup- 
plied by the English people. Wycliffe thus be- 
came the embodiment of nationalism. 

Afterwards, he denounced transubstantiation, 
thereby strengthening his argument, as it was 
the administration of the sacrament that ele- 
vated the poorest priest above the crowned 
head. The church repeatedly demanded that 
the University of Oxford should condemn Wyc- 
liffe's tenets, and even to surrender his body ; 
but this demand was steadily refused. The 
great university made noble answer through its 
head. Chancellor Rugge : *' No bishop or arch- 
bishop has any authority whatever over the uni- 
versity in matters of belief." Oxford became a 
"nest of heretics." Ultimately, Wycliffe lost 
power with the state, when his movement as- 
sumed a political character. Wat Tyler's up- 
rising was attributed to him ; and the univer- 
sity, on pain of forfeiture of all liberties and 



I08 OXFORD. 

privileges, yielded to a command to displace its 
obnoxious chancellor and proctors. This con- 
cession served as an evil precedent. Even 
Lincoln College was founded by the bishop of 
the diocese, as " a little college of theologians to 
help in ruining heresy." In the course of time 
Jesus College was instituted by Hugh Price, to 
counteract the influence of Lincoln, for thus did 
opinion play at see-saw in Oxford. ^ Renewed 
commissions failed to extirpate heresy in the 
university, which was covert and stubborn. The 
mendicant order established by Wycliffe grew 
formidable, was persecuted, and was almost ex- 
tinguished, although, after the passing of a cen- 
tury, we hear Erasmus ironically expressing the 
hope that either " LoUardism or persecution 
would stop before winter, for it raised the price 

1 Concerning the founder of Jesus College there is this epi- 
gram : — 

" Hugo Preesh 

Built this Collesh 
For Jesus Creesh 
And the Welsh Geesh 
Who love a peesch 
Of toasted cheesh 
And here it ish." 

Moore's Histoi'ical Haiidbook, p. 48. A book full of curious 
matter. 



OXFORD. 109 

of fire-wood." Despite papal bulls and anathe- 
mas, Wycliffe died in his bed ; but after his 
bones had rested thirty years in their grave, 
they were exhumed by order of the Council of 
Constance, and burnt. They were burnt too 
late ! The ashes were '' cast into the brook, 
whence," his followers said, " they reached the 
sea, and thus the whole world became his sepul- 
chre." And it was so. His writings were car- 
ried by wandering students over all Europe, and 
led to the Hussite revolt in Bohemia, the pre- 
lude to the Reformation. The'crowning achieve- 
ment of Wycliffe's life was his translation of 
the Vulgate into language which the people 
spoke and understood. Abandoning the scho- 
lastic Latin, he became the father of English 
prose, even as Chaucer, his contemporary, be- 
came the father of English poetry. Until Wyc- 
liffe's time French was the language of fashion 
and of the law ; and we find a statute of Oriel 
College, Oxford, as late as 1325, enjoining the 
students to speak in Latin or in French. Nev- 
ertheless, Oxford had much to do with forming 
English prose. Wycliffe's successor, William 
Tyndale, who published a translation of the 



no OXFORD. 

New Testament and of the Pentateuch in 1526, 
studied in Magdalen Hall (afterwards Hertford 
College). His translation, and that of Wy cliff e, 
"the common ancestor " of all English editions, 
were largely the basis of the King James ver- 
sion, the making of which was suggested by 
an Oxonian. To the committee who translated 
the King James version, Oxford contributed 
fourteen members, and in the revision made 
recently the university was also represented. 

But the path of the new learning was rugged, 
and was weirdly lighted by the flames of living 
funeral pyres. William Tyndale was tried for 
heresy, and strangled, his body being given to 
the fire. And other punishments less merciful 
were employed. Campanella was imprisoned 
twenty-seven years, and seven times put to the 
torture. " Free thought was a crime," but not 
for always. It is the pride of Oxford to have 
nurtured some of those brave spirits who fur- 
thered that great intellectual renaissance, the Prot- 
estant Reformation, a movement which wrought 
among other things the reform of the Catholic 
Church itself. Grocyn, Linacre, and Colet, Ox- 
ford students, had drunk thirstily at the foun- 



OXFORD. 1 1 1 

tains of the new learning in Italy during the era 
of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and upon their 
return to Oxford they revived the study of the 
Greek language and literature, and sounded the 
note of religious reformation. Colet, ignoring 
the schoolmen, invested the Scriptures with a 
new meaning, giving to them a plain, common- 
sense interpretation. Deeply impressed with 
the iniquities which he saw at Rome, he de- 
nounced the Pope as "wickedly distilling poison 
to the destruction of the church," and demanded 
a purification of the whole clerical system. He 
gained two notable disciples and associates, 
Thomas More and Erasmus. This remarkable 
croup may be described in Erasmus' own words : 
"When I listen to my friend Colet, it seems to 
me like listening to Plato himself. In Grocyn, 
who does not admire the wide range of his 
knowledge? What could be more searching, 
deep, and refined than the judgment of Linacre ? 
Whenever did nature mould a character more 
gentle, endearing, and happy than Thomas 
More's ? " Erasmus went from Oxford to Italy 
to study Greek, and thus to prepare himself for 
his great work. When he came back to Eng- 



1 1 2 OXFORD. 

land, he published his " Praise of Folly/' a sting- 
ing satire on the clergy, which he wrote in 
More's house in London ; and his translation 
of the Greek Testament, done in Cambridge, 
in which the Latin and Greek texts were ar- 
ranged in parallel columns. These works cre- 
ated a great sensation throughout Europe, the 
latter having far-reaching consequences. The 
translation was read by Luther, and elicited a 
tribute of admiration from Melancthon. It un- 
dermined the belief in the absolute inspiration 
of the Vulgate version of the Bible, and thereby 
shook the authority of the church. Colet went 
to London, where he was made Dean of St. 
Paul's, and where he taught the new learning 
in a school which he founded. Sir Thomas 
More preached democracy and religious toler- 
ation in his '' Utopia." When the papal bull 
denouncing Luther reached Germany, and the 
Elector of Saxony was ordered to surrender the 
heretic, the elector took counsel of Erasmus, 
asking him what he really thought of Luther. 
Erasmus laconically summed up the situation 
thus: "Luther," he said, "has committed two 
crimes. He has hit the Pope on the crown and 



OXFORD. 1 1 3 

the monks on the belly." The elector did not 
deliver up Luther, and Luther burned the bull. 
The Oxford and the Wittenberg reformers were 
helpmeets, their point of agreement being the 
need of the immediate reformation of the 
church. But in other respects their differences 
were radical. Oxford, as Mr. Seebohm points 
out in his charming book, was far in advance of 
Wittenberg. Luther was a lineal descendant of 
the schoolmen, Wycliffe and Huss, and, in ac- 
cepting their Augustinianism, he adhered to the 
scholastic or dogmatic system of theology. The 
basis of this theology was, first, "the plenary 
inspiration of each text contained in the Scrip- 
tures ; and, secondly, the existence of an ecclesi- 
astical authority of some kind capable of estab- 
lishing theological hypotheses; so that, in this 
respect, Luther and other Augustinian reform- 
ers, instead of advancing beyond the Oxford 
reformers, have lagged far behind." The re- 
sult was, that " the Protestant movement, whilst 
accomplishing by one revolutionary blow many 
objects which the Oxford reformers were striv- 
ing, and striving in vain, to compass by constitu- 
tional means, has been so far antagonistic to 



114 OXFORD. 

their work in other directions as to throw it back, 
— not to say to wipe it out of remembrance, — 
so that in this nineteeth century those Chris- 
tians who have desired, as they did, to rest their 
faith upon honest facts and not upon dogmas, 
upon evidence and not upon authority, instead 
of taking up the work where the Oxford re- 
formers left it, have had to begin it again at the 
beginning, as Colet did at Oxford in 1496. They 
have had, Uke the Oxford reformers, to combat 
at the outset the theory of 'plenary inspiration,' 
and the tendency inherited along with it from 
St. Augustine, by both schoolmen and Protes- 
tant reformers, to build up a theology, as I have 
said, upon unverified hypotheses, and to narrow 
the boundaries of Christian fellowship by the im- 
position of dogmatic creeds so manufactured." ^ 
The diffusion of secular learning went on apace, 
and the gulf between the old and the new wid- 
ened. Hebrew and Greek were denounced by 
churchmen as heretical tongues, and in Oxford 
two parties were formed, the Greeks and the 
Trojans. The enmity of the conservatives was 
bitter, as Vives testifies. He was invited from 

1 Seebohm's Oxford Reformers, pp. 494, 496, 497. 



OXFORD. I 1 5 

Spain to teach Greek in Corpus Christi, a col- 
lesre which was the first fruit of the classical re- 
vival. He says, " I must take care of my health, 
especially here, where, if I were to fall ill, I 
should be cast out upon a dung-hill, and where 
there would be no one who would regard me 
better than a vile, diseased dog." 

Later in the century another and greater 
critic of Aristotelianism, Giordano Bruno, came 
to Oxford to take part in a dialectical tourna- 
ment, which was one of the features of a fete 
given by the Earl of Leicester, Chancellor of the 
University, to the County Palatine, Albert de 
Lasco ; for such was the manner of the time. 
Bruno claims that he stopped the mouth of his 
adversary fifteen times ; it is certain that he 
gave great offense by his arrogance. After- 
wards, while delivering a course of lectures, he 
was indiscreet enough to deride the authorities, 
and to style them •* a constellation of pedants," 
which put an end to his connection with the 
university. Aristotelianism was statutory at 
Oxford, as it was in the University of Paris 
and in the church. The universe was a closed 
sphere, with an immobile earth as its centre. 



Il6 OXFORD. 

Bruno declared that there was an infinity of 
worlds. He asserted also the diurnal revolution 
of the earth. Copernicus, Bruno, Galileo, Kep- 
ler, and Newton are the order of a noble pro- 
gression, and the issue presented by them was 
momentous. The establishment of the helio- 
centric doctrine was a cataclysm of thought. It 
dethroned man as the sovereign of created 
things. The stars in their beauty were not 
made to give him light. His world was but a 
point in the infinite ; it was a satellite, and not 
a sun. All this involved a denial of the infalli- 
bility of the church, the overshadowing power of 
Christendom, and the assertion of the supremacy 
of human reason. Galileo was compelled to 
bend his knees before the cardinals, and to curSe 
and to abjure the heliocentric doctrine ; Bru- 
no's free spirit went up in flame. But persecu- 
tion was not wholly Catholic. Oxford suffered 
sadly during the whole period of religious refor- 
mation. A visitation instituted by Henry VHL, 
a too zealous convert to the new learning, sup- 
pressed the study of the canon law, and scat- 
tered the leaves of the scholastic writings about 
the quadrangles. " Dunce " (Duns Scotus) was 



OXFORD. 1 1 7 

'' set in Bocardo " (as the saying went), a prison 
which surmounted the north gate of the town. 
Mr. Boase ingeniously suggests that the sin- 
gular name of this place of confinement may 
have been adapted sarcastically from the " syl- 
logism called Bocardo, out of which the reasoner 
could not ' brihg himself back into his first fig- 
ure ' without the use of special processes." In 
the reign of Edward VI. religious reformation 
almost emptied the university. There were two 
visitations, and ''not only were the old services 
abolished, but altars, images, statues, ' the things 
called organs,' and everything else which seemed 
to savour of ' superstition,' were defaced or swept 
away. ... * Cartloads ' of classical and scien- 
tific manuscripts were consigned to the flames, 
together with many an illuminated masterpiece 
of scholastic literature." ^ 

Under Mary there was burning of bodies as 
well as of books. Opposite Balliol College, of 
which at one time Wy cliff e was the head, stands 
a memorial to the Protestant martyrs, Cranmer, 
Archbishop of Canterbury, and Bishops Latimer 

1 G. C. Brodrick, Warden of Merton, A History of the Uni- 
versity of Oxford, p. 8i. 



Il8 OXFORD. 

and Ridley, who were burned in Bloody Mary's 
reign near this spot. Latimer and Ridley stood 
side by side in death, and, as the flames 
mounted, Latimer spake in these words : " Be 
of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the 
man. We shall this day light such a candle by 
God's grace in England as I trust shall never 
be put out." Cranmer witnessed the execution 
from Bocardo, and perished six months later at 
the same stake. '' Fire being now put to him, 
he stretched out his right hand and thrust it 
into the flame, and held it there a good space, 
before the fire came to any other part of his 
body ; where his hand was seen of every man 
sensibly burning, crying with a loud voice, ' This 
hand hath offended.' As soon as the fire got 
up, he was very soon dead, never stirring nor 
crying all the while." 

The present generation may be interested in 
knowing what it cost to burn a good man, or 
several of them : — 

" For three loads of wood fagots, 12s. 
** Item, one load of furze fagots, 3s. 4d. 
" For the carriage of these four loads, 2s. 
" Item, A post, is. 4d. 



OXFORD. 119 

" Item, Two chains, 3s. 4d. 
" Item, Two staples, 6d. 
" Item, Four laborers, 2s. 8d. 
" Total cost of burning Ridley and Latimer, i 
pound, 5s. 2d." 

The cost of burning Cranmer was eleven 
shillings, four pence. 

Elizabeth ordered a "mild and gentle, not 
rigorous reformation " of the university. She, 
who disprized " logical conclusions," and who 
always steered a middle course, counseled the 
doctors to be moderate in their Protestantism. 
It was during her reign that Oxford received its 
best gift, the Bodleian Library, which is now so 
rich in manuscripts, and which is so dear to all 
the lovers of lore. 

But, in another particular, Elizabeth's time was 
less benignant. The heaviest blow dealt to Ox- 
ford came from her favorite, the Earl of Leices- 
ter, whose chancellorship has been referred to. 
He it was who shut the gates of that place of 
learning in the face of all who would not sub- 
scribe to the Thirty-nine Articles and to the Act 
of Supremacy. This proscription, which was di- 
rected solely against Catholics, afterwards came 



1 20 OXFORD. 

to include Puritans and Wesleyans ; in fact, all 
forms of dissent. Oxford thus contracted into 
a Church of England institution, resembling in 
some respects a theological seminary, and ceased 
to be a university. The splendid title then lost 
was not regained until the present century, 
when, in these knowing and denying days, the 
walls of a Unitarian college are rearing them- 
selves in the very shadows of old and frowning 
ecclesiastical halls. 

History has dealt hardly with Leicester's 
name in other matters, and less justly. He is 
linked forever, and in an ignoble way, with the 
fate of Amy Robsart, who lived and died at 
Cumnor Hall, three miles southeast of Oxford. 
Romance would seem to be alien to the home 
of monasticism, and yet Scott's unfortunate 
heroine is buried in the university church. A 
very illegible manuscript in the Bodleian gives 
an account of her funeral. There was a great 
procession. " The pore men and women in 
gownes . . . the universities, two and two to- 
gether accordinge to the degres of the colleges, 
and before every house ther officers with their 
staves . . . the quere in surplesses singinge, 



OXFORD. I 2 1 

and after them the minestar . . . the corpes 
borne by eight yoemen for the way was farre." 
The body was placed on the hearse, and on 
"eche syde of the hersse stod two gentlemen 
holdinge the banneroles, and at the feet stood 
he that held the great banner." ^ 

Scott, we are assured, was misled by the mis- 
take of the nervous Doctor Babbington, who 
preached the funeral sermon. Thrice did he 
recommend to men's memory that virtuous lady 
so pitifully "murdered," instead of saying so 
pitifully " slain," — a difference somewhat occult. 
Later investigations show that the marriage of 
Amy Robsart and Robert Dudley was not secret, 
but was conducted in the presence of Edward 
VI. She died in 1560, although Scott represents 
her as an inmate of Kenilworth, during Eliza- 
beth's visit, fifteen years later. It appears also 
that at her death Robert Dudley persistently 
demanded an inquest ; that a jury was impan- 
eled, every man of whom was a stranger to him, 
and that they rendered a verdict of accidental 
death. 

The exterior of St. Mary's Church, the tomb 

Moore's Historical Handbook, p. 4'/. 



122 OXFORD. 

of Amy Robsart, is richly ornamented, and there 
arises a pinnacled spire which is a marvel of 
airiness and grace. In the Middle Ages, this 
edifice had served as the great hall of the uni- 
versity, as its seat of justice, of legislation, of 
examination, and of worship. It fronts on High 
Street, a thoroughfare said to be one of the 
finest in Great Britain. Wordsworth speaks 
of the ''streamlike windings of that glorious 
street," which, lined with stately colleges, is 
terminated in Magdalen bridge, a beautiful 
stone structure that spans the Cherwell. Over 
this bridge came the coaches from London in 
the olden days, laden with students, who greeted 
their Alma Mater with the musical post-horn. 
At the end of the bridge, Magdalen tower shoots 
up, a lofty structure, famous for the beauty of 
its proportions, and under it nestles Magdalen 
College, founded in the fifteenth century by 
William of Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester, 
and Lord High Chancellor. 

The encompassing gardens form a fit setting 
for this gem ; and they are famous as well, for 
here, beneath the elms, Addison was "steep- 
ing himself in the Latin poets and tagging 



OXFORD. 123 

Latin verses " during ten years. His " walk " is 
probably the most observed spot in Oxford. 
It is easy to understand the inspiration which 
he drew from the place. The gardens from his 
time have been inclosed with a defensive wall. 
Part of them are used as a deer park now. 
What with the flowing waters, the ancient trees, 
the shaded walks, the cool cloisters, the curious 
quadrangles, and the quaint carvings, it is not 
surprising that the sweet serenity of the college 
of "Seinte Marie Maugdalene" should be re- 
flected in the character and writings of the great 

essayist. 

In 1649, the head of Magdalen College invited 
Cromwell and Fairfax to dine with him ; and it 
is said that, in return for this hospitahty, his 
guests appropriated the organ in the chapel, and 
had it conveyed to Hampton Court, and that 
their followers broke the painted glass out of 
the windows, and trampled it under foot. The 
Puritans had a fashion of whitewashing the walls 
of all chapels that were decorated. They knew 
no more and cared no more about art than 
Biagio, who remonstrated with Paul III. con- 
cerning Michael Angelo's picture of the Last 



1 24 OXFORD. 

Judgment. He complained that the nudity of 
the figures was inappropriate to the Sistine 
Chapel. Michael Angelo, the *' baptized Phi- 
dias," took his revenge by putting Biagio in 
hell, and by giving him the ears of an ass ; and 
there he is to this day. Fortunate Puritan 
Fathers ! 

. It was the Cavaliers, however, and not the 
Roundheads, who played havoc with Oxford. 
When King Charles occupied the town, they 
used the cloisters and schools as magazines and 
granaries, and the colleges as barracks. The 
functions of the university were practically sus- 
pended. With the supremacy of the Puritans, 
Cromwell became chancellor of the university, 
and, despite the ungracious act here before 
mentioned, he proved to be a kindly patron of 
learning, he himself having been a student at 
Cambridge. There was, of course, the usual 
visitation, which was followed, at the Restora- 
tion, by another. 

After the revolution, as before, royalty so- 
journed at Oxford ; but more frequently in the 
earlier centuries, when Woodstock was a royal 
palace. The comings of the sovereigns were al- 



OXFORD. 125 

ways festal occasions. Anthony Wood gravely 
informs us that, with the visit of James I. and 
his court in 1603, the students became dissi- 
pated, and that there was much drunkenness, 
a statement calculated to leave upon the un- 
guarded mind the inference that prior to that 
time Oxford had been very exemplary indeed. 
It is difficult to believe so well of its early days. 
Certainly the traditions are against it, if we are 
to accept as descriptive a bacchanalian note 
uttered in the long ago by Walter Mapes, Arch- 
deacon of Oxford. The verses, delightfully para- 
phrased by Leigh Hunt, run in this wise : — 

" Mihi est propositum in taberna mori, 
Vinum sit appositum morientis ori, 
Ut dicant, cum venerint angelorura chori; 
* Deus sit propitius huic potatori.' 

" Poculis accendentur animi lucerna ; 
Cor inbutum nectare volat ad superna ; 
Mihi sapit dulcius vinum in taberna, 
Quam quod aqua miscuit praesulis pincerna. 

" Suum cuique proprium dat natura munus, 
Ego nunquam potui scribere jejunus ; 
Ne jejunum vincere posset puer unns; 
Sitim et jejunium odi tanquam funus. 



126 OXFORD. 

" Tales versus facio quale vinum bibo, 
Non possum scribere nisi sumpto cibo ; 
Nihil valet penitus quod jejunus scribo, 
Nasonem post calices facile prseibo. 

" Mihi nunquam spiritus prophetiae datur, 
Nisi cum f uerit venter bene satur ; 
Cum in acre cerebri Bacchus dominatur, 
In me Phoebus irruit ac miranda fatur." 

" I devise to end my days — in a tavern drinking; 

May some Christian hold for me — the glass when I am shrink- 
ing ; 

That the cherubim may cry — when they see me sinking, 

God be merciful to a soul — of this gentleman's way of think- 
ing. 

** A glass of wine amazingly— enlighteneth one's internals; 
'T is wings bedewed with nectar — that fly up to supernals ; 
Bottles cracked in taverns — have much the sweeter kernels, 
Than the sups allowed to us — in the college journals. 

" Every one by nature hath — a mould which he was cast in : 
I happen to be one of those — who never could write fasting ; 
By a single little boy — I should be surpass'd in 
Writing so : I 'd just as lief — be buried, tomb'd and grass'd in. 

*' Every one by nature hath — a gift, too, a dotation; 
I, when I make verses, — do get the inspiration 
Of the very best wine — that comes into the nation ; 
It maketh sermons to abound — for edification. 



OXFORD. 127 

" Just as liquor floweth good — floweth forth my lay so ; 
But I must moreover eat — or I could not say so; 
Nought it availeth inwardly — should I write all day so ; 
But with God's grace after meat — I beat Ovidius Naso. 

" Neither is there given to me — prophetic animation, 
Unless when I have eat and drank — yea, ev'n to saturation 
Then in my upper story — hath Bacchus domination, 
And Phoebus rusheth into me — and beggareth all relation." 

It was a merry Oxford indeed, then and after- 
wards ; and good stories of its conviviality are 
not lacking. Humphrey Prideaux, an annalist 
of the university, and contemporary of Anthony 
Wood, tells us that there was once " a dingy, 
horrid, scandalous ale-house " over against Bal- 
liol College, where a " hellish liquor cald ale " 
was sold, for which the fellows of Balliol had 
a liking. Thomas Good, master of Balliol, pro- 
tested vigorously against this " perpetuall bubbe- 
ing;" and was informed by one who was ''not 
willing soe tamely to be preached out of his 
beloved liquor," that the " vice-chancellor's men 
also drink ale at the Split Crow. . . . The 
old man being nonplussed with this reply im- 
mediately packeth off to the vice-chancelour, 
who . . . was an old lover of ale him self e, and 



128 OXFORD. 

who answared him roughly, that there was noe 
hurt in ale." Thereupon the master of Balliol 
returned to his college, called the fellows to- 
gether again, and told them that as he had been 
assured that there was no hurt in ale, they all 
might now be "sots by authority." 

The visits of Charles II. to Oxford did not pro- 
mote the decorum of university life, although 
they may have strengthened the authority of the 
Crown. After the discovery of the Rye House 
plot (1683), the university, in an extraordinary 
fit of flunkeyism, decreed " against certain perni- 
cious books and damnable doctrines destructive 
to the sacred persons of Princes, their State and 
Government, and of all Human Society." The 
decree recited twenty-seven propositions as he- 
retical, and condemned the books which con- 
tained and expounded them *'to be publicly 
burnt by the hand of our marshal in the court 
of our schools." An examination of some of 
the propositions, as set out in the decree, dis- 
closes that it was the books and not the doctrines 
which were destroyed in the university bonfire. 
The first three propositions are as follows : — 
"The 1st proposition. All civil authority is 
derived originally from the people. 



OXFORD. 129 

" 2. There is a mutual compact, tacit or ex- 
press, between a prince and his subjects, that if 
he perform not his duty, they are discharged 
from theirs. 

"■ 3. That if lawful governors become tyrants, 
or govern otherwise than by the laws of God 
and man they ought to do, they forfeit the right 
they had unto their government. Lex Rex; 
Buchanan, de Jure Regni ; Vindiciae contra 
tyrannos ; Bellarmine, de Conciliis, de Pontifice ; 
Milton ; Goodwin ; Baxter ; H. C." 

In solemn reprobation of these "false, sedi- 
tious, and impious " propositions, the university 
proclaimed the doctrine of Divine Right, and en- 
joined passive obedience upon all persons sub- 
ject to its authority. It was soon to taste the 
fruits of this servility. 

James 11, came to Oxford in an ugly mood. Al- 
though he had no legal right to name the heads 
of colleges, he endeavored personally to coerce 
Magdalen College into accepting a candidate of 
his choice. His first nominee, a papist, was re- 
jected by the fellows as unfit to hold the of^ce, 
and another man was elected. James's second 
nominee, the Bishop of Oxford, was installed by 



130 OXFORD. 

force after the president and twenty-five fellows 
had been ejected. At one time William Penn 
visited Oxford as a mediator between the king 
and the belligerent institution. The founder of 
Pennsylvania was not unknown to the univer- 
sity, whence he had been expelled long before 
for participation in the *' surplice riot." It 
seems that he was enrolled in Christ Church 
during the Protectorate, and that after the Res- 
toration, when some students made their ap- 
pearance for the first time in white surplices, 
he and others fell upon them zealously, and 
stripped them of the hated garments. Christ 
Church, or Cardinal College, Penn's sometime 
collegiate home, is the most splendid founda- 
tion in Oxford. Founded by Wolsey, it was 
completed by Henry VIII., who diverted to its 
maintenance the revenues of twenty-two priories 
and convents (themselves suppressed). It occu- 
pies ground sacred in pietistic tradition. Here 
rest (supposedly) the bones of St. Frideswide, 
a maiden of the eighth century, who devoted 
herself to a monastic life. Her father built for 
her upon this spot a conventual church, in the 
tower of which a number of fugitive Jews and 



OXFORD. 1 3 I 

Danes were burned shortly after the Danish in- 
vasion. In architecture Christ Church is un- 
surpassed. The present college consists of four 
quadrangles, three of them small, and one very 
large and magnificent. The gateway is sur- 
mounted by a tower (designed by Sir Christo- 
pher Wren, a son of Oxford), which contains 
the '' Great Tom " bell, the thirty-first in size 
of the world. Before it was recast in 1680, it 
bore the following inscription, which attests the 
resonance of the tone and the soundness of 
the metal : — 

" In Thomse laude resono Bim Bom sine fraude." 

A dean of Christ Church of the seventeenth 
century extolled the bells of his college in the 
following verse : — 

" Hark ! the bonny Christ Church bells, — 

I, 2, 3, 4, 5. 6,— 

They sound so wondrous great, so woundy sweet, 

As they trowl so merrily, merrily. 

Oh ! the first and second bell. 

That every day, at four and ten, cry, 

' Come, come, come, come to prayers ! ' 

And the Verger troops before the Dean, 

Tinkle, tinkle, ting, goes the small bell at nine. 



132 OXFORD. 

To call the bearers home ; 
But the devil a man 
Will leave his can 
Till he hears the mighty Tom." 

Christ Church is built of stone, as, indeed, are 
all the colleges of Oxford, save one. It remained 
for the nineteenth century to erect a structure 
of red and yellow brick. The beauties of Christ 
Church are many. There is a noble Gothic fane, 
and a refectory whose oak roof is a wonder. 
There are fretted stone ceilings and graceful 
springing columns. But all these are for the 
pencil. Christ Church has a great human in- 
terest, since it boasts many illustrious names. 
Among these may be mentioned rare Ben Jon- 
son, Sir Philip Sidney, and Richard Hakluyt, 
the stay-at-home traveler, " whose diction," says 
Lowell, ** we should be glad to buy back from 
desuetude at any cost." 

In the hall (the seat of many parHaments) are 
some noted portraits, and among them one, by< 
Kneller, of John Locke, who held a scholarship 
here for a number of years. Locke was expelled 
at the instigation of the crown, after the Convo- 
cation had issued the celebrated decree of 1683. 



OXFORD. 133 

Owing to his intimacy with the Earl of Shaftes- 
bury, and to his retired if not secretive habits, 
he was accused of compUcity in plots against 
the government of Charles II. We can only 
hope^hat the charge was true. If Christ Church 
had an intellectual reformer in John Locke, it 
had an emotional one in John Wesley. After 
graduation Wesley was elected a Fellow of Lin- 
coln College, and was appointed Greek lecturer. 
His range of study included the classics, logic, 
ethics, mathematics, Hebrew, Arabic, metaphy- 
sics, natural philosophy, rhetoric, poetry, and 
divinity. Methodism originated in a club of 
which he, his brother Charles, and Whitefield 
were members, and who were nicknamed by the 
Oxonians, Bible Bigots, Bible Moths, Hply Club, 
and, at last, Methodists. Whitefield, in his de- 
votional ecstasies, would lie on the ground in 
Christ Church, on winter nights, until he would 
almost perish from cold. John Wesley mixed 
a little in politics. Before going to America, 
he preached.in St. Mary's Church a sermon that 
- smacked of treason," and concerning which his 
brother Charles said : '* My brother has been 
mauled, and threatened more, for his Jacobite 



1 34 OXFORD. 

sermon in St. Mary's. But he was wise enough 
to get the vice-chancellor to read and approve it 
before he preached it, and may therefore bid 
Wadham, Exeter, and Christ Church do their 
worst," which, it must be said, the colleges in 
Oxford oftentimes did. At one time Wesley 
thought he was going to die, and so composed 
his own epitaph : ^' Here lieth the body of John 
Wesley, a brand plucked out of the burning, 
who died of a consumption in the fifty-first year 
of his age, not leaving, after his debts are paid, 
ten pounds behind him, praying God to be 
merciful to me, an unprofitable servant." 

He recovered, and lived thirty-seven years 
after, and evidently to some purpose. The 
Methodist Club of fifteen members has ex- 
panded into a church of twenty-five millions. 
Methodism also possessed political consequence. 
The eloquence of Wesley and Whitefield at- 
tracted the first great public meetings held in 
England. It was the initial exercise of the art 
of popular persuasion. These novel gatherings 
taught the multitude their right to assemble, 
and, it may be, discovered to them their equality 
of condition, their community of interest, and 



OXFORD. 135 

the enormous power which lay stored in them 
as " the people." ^ Contemporary with Wesley 
was Berkeley, who is buried in Christ Church 
Cathedral, and Butler, who studied in Oriel Col- 
lege. If the deistic movement in England may 
be said to owe its origin to Locke, and therefore 
to Christ Church, the anti-deistic movement 
may also, in a sense, be ascribed to Oriel. In 
the present century. Oriel was the scene of yet 
another religious revival, — the " Oxford Move- 
ment." Though Catholic in its tendencies, 
Tractarianism, Puseyism, or Newmanism, as it 
was differently called, had a vastly invigorating 
effect upon the Established Church. ''Forty 
years ago," says Matthew Arnold, "when I was 
an undergraduate at Oxford, voices were in the 
air there which haunt my memory still. . . . He 
(Newman) was in the very prime of life ; he was 
close at hand to us at Oxford ; he was preaching 
in St. Mary's pulpit every Sunday ; he seemed 
about to transform and to renew what was for 
us the most national and natural institution in 
the world, the Church of England. Who could 
resist the charm of that spiritual apparition, 

1 Henry Jephson, The Platform : Its Rise and Progress, p. 4. 



136 OXFORD. 

gliding in the dim afternoon light through the 
aisles of St. Mary's, rising into the pulpit, and 
then, in the most entrancing of voices, breaking 
the silence with words and thoughts which were 
a religious music, — subtile, sweet, mournful ? I 
seem to hear him still, saying : ' After the fever 
of life, after wearinesses and sicknesses, fight- 
ings and despondings, languor and fretfulness, 
struggling and succeeding ; after all the changes 
and chances of this troubled, unhealthy state, — 
at length comes death, at length the white throne 
of God, at length the beatific vision.' " 

Oxford was notoriously high church, and the 
Neo-Catholic revival more nearly accorded with 
the traditions of the place than any other move- 
ment of its later history. Newman severed his 
connection with the university by resignation, 
faring better in this respect than some of his 
gifted predecessors. Oxford had a way of ex- 
pelling its geniuses, as we have seen. Gibbon 
went to Magdalen College " with a stock of in- 
formation which might have puzzled a doctor, 
and a degree of ignorance of which a school-boy 
might be ashamed." The fourteen months 
which he spent there were, he said, the most 



OXFORD. 137 

idle and unprofitable of his whole life. Perhaps 
the mind of the great historian — the conspicu- 
ous infidel of his day — was stirred uneasily, in 
after years, by the recollection that he had been 
expelled from Oxford for joining the Catholic 
Church. Other sons, such as Dr. Johnson, of 
Pembroke, whose experiences, though different, 
were less pleasant, had kindlier memories of the 
place. In the present century, the university 
sent adrift the poet Shelley, one of the marked 
individualities of his time, and the " Pagan '* 
Landor. De Quincey (who, by the way, first 
tasted opium in his second year at Oxford) ex- 
plains that Shelley was expelled, not for compil- 
ing and publishing an atheistical or deistical 
pamphlet, but for his ostentation in sending a 
copy of the pamphlet to each of the dons, which 
was accounted a breach of discipline. Walter 
Savage Landor was dismissed from Trinity Col- 
lege for playfully emptying the contents of a 
double-barreled shotgun into the windows of a 
man living upon the opposite side of the quad- 
rangle, of whose political opinions he did not ap- 
prove. Although the shutters were closed, and 
no bodily damage was done, the univeisity failed 



138 OXFORD. 

utterly to discover in this impulsive and highly 
original act the distinctive poetic temperament, 
and so Landor was " sent down," as the phrase 
runs. 

The university was more lenient in the last 
half of the last century, when it would forgive 
almost anything but religious apostasy. Tutors 
were listless, and proctorial authority limp. 
" The fellows of Magdalen," says Gibbon, "were 
decent, easy men, who supinely enjoyed the gifts 
of the founder. . . . From the toil of reading, 
or thinking, or writing, they had absolved their 
consciences." This was during one of the 
periods of depression .which marked the uni- 
versity life from time to time, and which may 
be partly explained by the fact that for cen- 
turies the university had been subjected to ec- 
clesiastical espionage. It had lost in vitality 
when its democratic constitution was destroyed 
by Leicester and Laud. It was swallowed up 
by the colleges, which were themselves little 
more than adjuncts of the Established Church. 

Independence, the essential attribute of the 
ideal university, was lacking. A temple of 
learning should be supported neither by the 



OXFORD. 139 

church nor by the state ; and its benefactions 
should not be the expressions of mental caprice. 
Those colleges in Oxford have prospered most 
whose fellowships have been freest. Of these 
may be mentioned Balliol College, noted for its 
high scholarship. The rolls of Balliol are illu- 
minated by illustrious names such as those of 
Adam Smith, who, hke Locke, created a science, 
and of Southey, and of Swinburne. Its present 
master is B. Jowett, the Regius professor of 
Greek, whose delightful translations have made 
Plato the familiar of the English reading world. 
With the successive creation of professorships 
the university has emerged and again taken 
form. It is known for ripe erudition, and has 
included among its instructors of recent years 
Liddell, Stubbs, Max Muller, Earle, Maine, Rus- 
kin, John Richard Green, Goldwin Smith, Free- 
man, Froude, Bryce, Thorold Rogers, H. Morse 
Stephens, and W. R. Morfill, not to mention a 
host of others. Six schools of honors have been 
established : theology, natural science, jurispru- 
dence, mathematics, modern history, and Uteres 
humaniores ; the examination system has been 
m^odified and perfected ; and all religious tests 



140 OXFORD. 

have been abolished. Once more the university- 
is hospitable to men and thought. 

Any sketch of Oxford, however fragmentary, 
would imply some reference to Cambridge, the 
twin English university. The two institutions 
are correlatives. They were born about the 
same time, and they have run nearly parallel 
lives. The rivalry between them has been gen- 
erous, and has produced more than one neat epi- 
gram. The most celebrated of these grew out 
of the persistent Jacobitism of Oxford, lasting 
even to the time of George I. With the incom- 
ing of the Hanoverian dynasty, Tory Oxford 
was restive and openly favored the Pretender. 
The new king sent a troop of horse there to 
keep the peace, and at the same time he gave a 
splendid library to Cambridge. This evoked the 
following Oxford verse : — 

" The king observing, with judicious eyes, 
The state of both his universities, 
To Oxford sent a troop of horse ; and why? 
That learned body wanted loyalty ; 
To Cambridge books he sent, as well discerning 
How much that loyal body wanted learning." 

A Cambridge graduate thereupon made this 
reply, which Dr. Johnson pronounced to be one 



OXFORD. H^ 

of the best extemporaneous productions he had 
ever met with. 

"The king to Oxford sent a troop of horse, 
For Tories own no argument but force ; 
With equal skill to Cambridge books he sent, 
For Whigs admit no force but argument." 

The two universities are absolutely more effi- 
cient in the present than they were in the past, 
but they are relatively less important. Outside 
of them there are a thousand and one educational 
influences which did not exist in the Middle 
Ages. Then, they were the eyes of England, 
peopling 

« The hollow dark like burning stars." 

Now they seem less brilUant only because they 
have helped to usher in the day. 



SOME POPULAR OBJECTIONS TO 
CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 



SOME POPULAR OBJECTIONS TO 
CIVIL SERVICE REFORM.^ 



*'You gentlemen never weary of telling us 
that we are fallen upon degenerate days ; that 
during the first forty years of our government, 
before we lapsed from our sinless state, officials 
were removed only for cause, and incumbents 
held on good behavior ; in other words, that civil 
service reform prevailed in all its purity. Now, 
it is philosophical generalization, founded on 
broad experience, that revolutions do not go 
backwards. Heed it, gentlemen, heed it ! The 
revolution of 1820-29 is an accomplished fact. 
It is here to stay, for then did the people come 

1 Such of these objections as are taken from the records of 
Congress are indicated by marginal notes and are quoted lit- 
erally. The others — which reflect current lay discussion of the 
newspaper and the street — are repeated substantially, but not 
formally. 



146 CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

into their own. The present status has endured 
for a half century ; civil service reform is ancient 
history. You are chasing moonbeams." 

The fatalist intrenches himself in platitude, 
and warns reason beyond speaking distance. 
With him, v^hat is must forever be ;' what has 
been and is not will never be. And thus is the 
controversy closed. 

He forgets that much that is done remains to 
be undone ; that political progress is mostly 
negative, consisting mainly in the repeal of bad 
laws or in the abolition of evil customs. In this 
sense history is reversed every day, and the 
process will continue, so long as legislation is 
experimental, and legislators are supine. It is 
true that some things in political history may be 
regarded as settled. But this can be predicated 
only of those changes which are based upon the 
immutable principles of right. The introduction 
of the spoils system into the administrative 
branch of the American government is not of 
these. That system is at war with equality, 
freedom, justice, and a wise economy, and is 
already a doomed thing fighting extinction. Its 
establishment was in no sense a popular revolu- 



CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 1 47 

tion, but was the work of a self-willed man of 
stubborn and tyrannical nature, who had enemies 
to punish, and debts to pay. He overrode a 
vehement opposition, disregarding the protest 
and sage prediction of the great statesmen of 
his time. He wielded a power that was arbi- 
trary ; his caprice was law, his rule was a reign. 
If he wished to do a thing, it was enough that it 
seemed good to him to do it. His idea of gov- 
ernment was a personal one solely. Every pub- 
lic official was a private servitor, who must take 
the oath of allegiance and do homage to his 
chief. In his view, no man could honestly dis- 
agree with him. He was always right ; his op- 
ponents were hopelessly and criminally wrong. 
Here was a fit man to establish the spoils 
system, to explore the Constitution for latent 
executive powers, to attach to the person of the 
President the high prerogatives of a monarch. 
That the king is the fountain of honor, office, 
and privilege is the theory of the English state ; 
that the civil service of the United States is a 
perquisite of the presidency was the theory of 
General Jackson. 

It is needless to say that the American com- 



148 CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

monwealth was not founded upon any such doc- 
trine. Jackson's interpretation of the Constitu- 
tion was a gross perversion of the intent and 
meaning of that instrument. This was to be a 
government of laws, not of men ; and so far as 
the prescience of its framers availed it was made 
so. The liberties of the people were not to be 
left to individual scruple, but were to be secured 
by specific inhibitions upon the governmental 
agencies. Three departments were organized 
severally to make, execute, and interpret the 
laws, and each was to act as a check upon the 
other. With the adoption of the first ten amend- 
ments to the Constitution, it was thought that 
every avenue of attack upon popular rights had 
been closed. But the power of construction is 
greater than that of legislation. The intention 
of the lawgiver is determined, not by himself, 
but by some other who construes the law ; and 
with that other interpretation is purely a subjec- 
tive matter. Madison held that '' the wanton 
removal of meritorious officers " was an im- 
peachable offense. But Jackson swore to defend 
and to protect the Constitution as he under- 
stood it, and not as Madison, one of its framers, 



CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 1 49 

conceived it. Regarding the right of removal the 
instrument itself is silent, except as it provides 
impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors. 
When, therefore, Jackson organized the civil 
service into a gigantic political machine, pro- 
scribing office-holders because of his personal 
enmity to them, or because of their political af- 
filiations, it cannot be said that he violated any 
specific provision of the Constitution. That 
such action was an usurpation of authority and 
a wanton betrayal of trust needs no verbal em- 
phasis. With equal propriety and moral justifi- 
cation, he might have used those other coordinate 
branches of the executive department, the army 
and navy, to perpetuate himself and his party in 
powder. This he did not attempt to do. Perhaps 
he did not need their aid. At any rate, after 
securing his own reelection and after naming his 
successor, his ambition rested, — fortunately for 
the country. But what he did, he did thoroughly. 
The system of political brigandage inaugurated 
by him has subsisted even unto this day, al- 
though it is now upon the verge of dissolution. 
Its end is written and sealed. This last is the 
work of those who are grown weary of the spoli- 



150 CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

ation of office, — of those who are jealous of the 
encroachments of the Executive, and who would 
tie the hands of that functionary for all time to 
come. With them, it is not a question whether 
a clerk holds his office for four years or for fif- 
teen years. They are determined that the great 
army of the civil service shall not be used by 
any man or by any set of men for purposes of 
personal or partisan aggrandizement ; that the 
freedom of elections shall not be assailed by an 
intriguing, corrupt, and organized -official force ; 
that presidential contests shall not be tumults 
threatening anarchy. Hereafter there will be 
no *' prizes of victory," no carnival of spoil. 
Place-holders will attend to the business for 
which they are paid to attend ; fitness will be 
the essential of appointment, not the accident 
and the incident. This is the popular revolu- 
tion that is moving forward irresistibly, that is 
coming to stay. A law has been enacted which, 
though partial in its effects, is capable of large 
extension by the President alone, without further 
action on the part of Congress. This measure 
leaves the power of removal for all except par- 
tisan reasons untouched. By regulating the 



CIVIL SERVICE refoi:m. 151 

method of appointment, it takes away the temp- 
tation to the abuse of that discretion. It is not 
a revival of a faded statute, nor has it its counter- 
part in early legislation. It is a new ordering 
of things ; practically, a reversal of procedure. 
Although there was no statutory restriction 
upon the manner of appointment and removal, 
during the first forty years of the republic, never- 
theless the power of removal was controlled by 
an unwritten law, which depended for its en- 
forcement upon mental sanctions.^ But this 
was a frail dyke with which to withstand the 
pressure of a hungry and inflowing sea, and it 
was only a question of time until it should be 
swept away. That Congress did not strengthen 
it by positive legislation is to be deplored. But 
the omission is explicable. At the time of the 
formation of our government no law was deemed 
necessary. The civil service numbered but 
two thousand persons ; to-day it numbers two 
hundred thousand, and not many decades hence 
it will increase to a half million. Again, Con- 

1 The sum of the removals from 1789 to 1S29 was seventy- 
three. John Quincy Adams displaced but two persons during 
four years. His successor, Andrew Jackson, removed seven 
hundred persons during one yean 



152 CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

gress had absolute faith in the Executive. All 
Presidents would be Washingtons, patient and 
moderate, patriotic rather than partisan. So 
highly was the first President esteemed that 
that body waived its consent to the removal of 
those officers whose appointment required their 
approval. Of course they did not contemplate 
the capricious exercise of this power ; the cause- 
less removal of an official being to them an un- 
thinkable proposition. But events outran pre- 
vision, and in the course of years not only did 
a Jackson appear, but Congress itself ceased to 
desire to protect the service. Such legislative 
changes as were made subserved a private and 
not a public interest. The immense patronage 
which was controlled by the Chief Executive,* 
either directly by commission, or indirectly 
through the heads of departments, came to be 
administered for the benefit of the representa- 
tive politicians as well as of himself. This step 
was gained partly through a recognition by the 
President of the eminent utility of sub-allotment 
for personal purposes, and partly, in the failure 
of that persuasion, through the exercise of such 
coercive power as could be wielded by the Sen- 



CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. I 53 

ate in confirmation, and by both houses in the 
passage of acts regulating the term and tenure 
of office. Gradually, out of the chaotic scramble 
for spoil, there was evolved a system of distribu- 
tion which was founded upon hoary precedent, 
and which, in nice precision and in perfection 
of detail, lacked nothing of a scientific charac- 
ter. The whole country was staked out into 
districts, as many in number as there were Con- 
gressmen. After a conquest, the enemy were 
driven from their holdings, and the victors took 
possession of the glebe. But the estates thus 
granted were made conditional upon the per- 
forming of certain services or upon the render- 
ing of certain tribute. Each tenant held of some 
feudal superior, and all held, mediately or im- 
mediately, of the lord paramount, the President. 
The governmental offices scattered everywhere 
were so many baronial strongholds, and were 
filled with retainers who were chosen for their 
fighting qualities. 

The chief duty of these men was to check 
uprisings and to keep the people in subjection. 
Their places depended upon the faithful dis- 
charge of it. In other words, the civil service 



154 CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

was a graded vassalage of a militant character. 
All offices were the private property of the head 
of the state, and were dispensed by royal favor. 
What is this but feudalism in new clothes, or, 
rather, the garbed skeleton thereof ? By some 
fantastic jugglery, this mocking semblance of a 
dead and buried past has become a stalking 
figure in a new and progressive civilization. 
Verily has a revolution gone backwards, if it 
be not promptly relegated to the glass case of 
antiquities, there to remain as a curiosity for 
posterity to stare at. 

The spoils system should have perished a 
quarter of a century ago, in the cataclysm which 
destroyed that other relic of feudalism, slavery. 
They were twin evils, and were ever unfailing 
allies ; and when the time shall come to write 
the history of public opinion in America during 
the nineteenth century, they will be classed to- 
gether. John Morley says : " Nobody has yet 
traced out the full effect upon the national 
character of the Americans of all those years of 
conscious complicity in slavery, after the im- 
morality and iniquity of slavery had become 
clear to the inner conscience of the very men 



CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 1 55 

who ignobly sanctioned the mobbing of the 
Abohtionists." ^ 

Adherence to the letter of a contract which 
was "a covenant with death and an agreement 
with hell " was due partly to an unfaltering 
instinct of Union. But many were influenced 
by motives less worthy. Before the war the 
fidelity of most Northern politicians to the 
South was a degrading sycophancy. Eager and 
grateful for the crumbs which fell from the 
Southern table, and despairing of obtaining 
those crumbs elsewhere, they suffered them- 
selves to become the supple tools of the slave 
power. These " Swiss guards of slavery fight- 
ing for pay " were a race of place-hunters, with 
whom office was the end, not the means, and 
whose statesmanship, like that of the Augustan 
Senate, consisted in justifying personal flattery 
by speculative principles of servitude. They 
steadily prostituted principle to preferment, and 
came near involving this country in irretrieva- 
ble ruin. 

But the age of compromise — the era of "big- 
otry with a doubt " and of "persecution without 

1 Harriet Martineau, Critical Miscellanies, p. 268. 



156 CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

a creed " — was succeeded by the age of blood 
and iron. The war was an ethical education ; 
like a great storm, it purified the air. After it 
was over the people began to see more clearly 
and more truly; they learned to view things 
" in the visual angle of the absolute principle." 

Before this keener vision the spoils system, 
a long-established practice claiming charter by 
prescription, has been called upon to justify 
itself. Until recently, the people of this coun- 
try supposed that traffic in place, the unceasing 
clamor for office, the sack and pillage of the 
government by the dominant party, were a ne- 
cessary part of democratic institutions. Many 
politicians, with selfish purposes to subserve, 
were interested in enforcing this view. To the 
principle that the majority must rule they added 
the corollary that all the offices are essential 
to that rule. They further inculcated the idea 
that every national election is a battle of ene- 
mies, instead of an amicable contest of friends, 
whose interests are the same, and "who disa- 
gree not except in opinion." 

It must be confessed that during the Rebel- 
lion, when the North was divided between the 



CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 1 57 

war party and the peace party, there was some 
foundation for this doctrine. He who was not 
with you was against you. But the intense par- 
tisanism engendered by that strife is relaxing 
into an amiable toleration. Happily, party fealty 
is not always to be a test of patriotism. The 
government is not the property of faction, and 
the minority have rights which must be re- 
spected. " Vae victis " is no longer the slogan 
of the fight. If civil service reform has not 
made that progress which idealists expect, — 
conquering all on the instant, — let it be re- 
membered that the growth of moral movements 
is necessarily slow, especially in a democracy, 
where, it is scarcely hyperbole to say, the last 
man must be convinced. It is none the less 
sure, however, for ''one man in the right be- 
comes a majority," and the American people 
mean to do right when they know where the 
right lies. 

II. 

" I believe this commission to be undemo- 
cratic. I believe that it favors certain voters in 
this country at the expense of other voters, and 



158 CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

I know that if the rulings of the civil service 
commission were applied to the members of this 
House not seven eighths of the members would 
ever reach the floor again. [Laughter.] Now, 
sir, believing this to be undemocratic, and be- 
lieving that it is in violation of the fundamental 
principles of the government, I move to strike 
out the whole section, and hope that it will be 
agreed to." ^ 

To apply the rules of the merit system to the 
members of Congress would be a cruelty indeed, 
and is altogether a harrowing suggestion. But 
it is beside the point. If civil service reform 
be undemocratic, and if it violate the funda- 
mental principles of our government, the motion 
made in the House of Representatives to strike 
out the appropriation to the commission should 
have prevailed. As a matter of fact, it was 
overwhelmingly defeated by a vote of twenty- 
five to one hundred and thirty-eight. This 
would appear to be decisive. It is evident, 
however, from the discussion that preceded the 
calling of the yeas and nays, that the scope 

^ Mr. Cummings, Proceedings of the House of Representa- 
tives, December 19, 1888. 



CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. I 59 

and object of civil service reform are still pro- 
foundly misunderstood by some Congressmen, 
and inferentially by their constituencies. A 
restatement may therefore serve a useful pur- 
pose : — 

The doctrine of civil service reform as applied 
to the subordinate, clerical, or purely ministerial 
offices of the government is based upon the fol- 
lowing self-evident propositions : that offices are 
created to fulfill certain necessary functions in- 
volved in the routine of government, and no^t to 
give some men a place ; that offices are sup- 
ported by non-partisan taxation ; that taxation is 
an evil, and therefore the public service should 
be as efficient and economical as possible ; that 
offices are public and not private property, and 
administration is a trust, not an ownership ; that 
in a republic something less arbitrary than fa- 
voritism shall govern appointment and removal ; 
that men shall be appointed solely on the ground 
of merit, and not in payment of personal debt ; 
that an examination is the fairest means of as- 
certaining the qualifications of an appointee, be- 
cause it insures that a clerk shall know how to 
write, a book-keeper how to keep books, and a 



l60 CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

ganger how to gauge ; that such examination 
shall be competitive and open to all, not being 
confined to the members of any one political 
party ; that a class system is opposed to the 
spirit of our institutions, and therefore offices 
should not be the vested property of ward-work- 
ers and political henchmen, to the total and 
absolute exclusion of the great body of the 
common people ; that an office-holder is a citi- 
zen of the United States, and is entitled to the 
rights and privileges attaching to such citizen- 
ship ; that neither the President nor any other 
executive officer has the right to proscribe such 
office-holder, remove him from place, or threaten 
his subsistence on account of his politics ; that 
such procedure is un-American ; that tenure of 
office should not be dependent upon the degra- 
dation of manhood and the prostitution of polit- 
ical opinion ; that the practice of the President 
and his cabinet in changing two hundred thou- 
sand office-holders at will, for causes uncon- 
nected with good administration, is dangerous 
and despotic, and should be restrained ; that 
under the present system these office-holders con- 
stitute a great standing army of paid servitors, 



CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. l6l 

ever ready to do the bidding of their patrons, to 
the perversion of the pubUc will, and are a men- 
ace to good government ; that political assess- 
ments, if paid unwillingly, are an extortion and 
a direct theft from the office-holder, and, if paid 
willingly, are generally a brokerage commission 
for appointment, or a bribe to the appointing 
power for continuance in place ; that if salaries 
are so large that assessments can be endured 
without inconvenience, such salaries should be 
cut down to a saving of the people's money ; 
that promises of appointment to office made, 
whether definitely or indefinitely, work a cor- 
ruption of public opinion ; that the enormous 
bribe of two hundred thousand offices, offered 
as a reward for party work, tends to obscure the 
real issues of politics, encourages the sacrifice of 
principle to selfish personal gain, and induces a 
laxity of political morals ; that a '* clean sweep " 
of the offices demoralizes the public service, and 
is the direct and indirect source of great finan- 
cial loss ; that skill in the manipulation of a cau- 
cus and in the packing of a primary is not pre- 
sumptive evidence of capacity for the perform- 
ance of official duties ; that the Constitution of 



1 62 CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

the United States contemplates the election of 
a Congressman as a legislator, and not as a 
patronage-monger; that such patronage is a 
burden to every honest, conscientious, and able 
Congressman, compels the neglect of his proper 
duties, creates petty factional disputes and 
wrangles among his constituents, and often de- 
feats the reelection of a trustworthy servant of 
honorable record ; that the statesman is thus 
rapidly becoming an extinct species, being suc- 
ceeded by the politician, and the consequent 
loss inflicted on the people through crude and 
unwise legislation is incalculable ; that the fear 
of losing the spoils of office is paralyzing the 
legislative branch of the government, makes 
cowards of political parties, and is the enemy 
of progress ; that the retention of the vast pat- 
ronage of two hundred thousand offices is be- 
coming of more concern than the triumph of 
principle ; that the mania for place-hunting is 
increasing ; that the clam.or of spoilsmen com- 
pels the creation of sinecures, thereby increas- 
ing the taxes ; and finally, that all the evils here 
before enumerated are growing with the multi- 
plication of offices, and will ultimately, unless 



CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 1 63 

checked by a comprehensive and decisive enact- 
ment, undermine and overthrow the institu- 
tions of our country. 

Such is an imperfect outUne of the doctrine 
of civil service reform and of the abuses it is de- 
signed to remedy. By this showing, is it not 
the spoils system which is ** undemocratic," and 
which "favors certain voters of this country at 
the expense of other voters .-* " What, to repeat, 
can be less democratic, less American, than per- 
secution for opinion's sake .-^ Yet this is the very 
essence of the spoils system, its guiding spirit 
and its crowning infamy. If this assertion need 
further explication, it may be found in a recital 
of what takes place in this country when one 
party succeeds another in the control of the 
government. The newly elected President goes 
(by deputy) through all the departments, and 
may be supposed to interview each clerk in a 
conversation of which the following is typical : — 

President, Whom did you vote for at the 
last election } 

Clerk. That does not concern you. I am an 
American citizen, and have the right to vote 
for whomsoever I please, without being sub- 



164 CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

jected afterwards to a governmental inquisition 
by you or any other man. 

President. I asked the question in conformity 
with a time-honored practice, and shall insist 
upon an answer. 

Clerk. Very well ; I will answer the question, 
not because of your menaces, but because I do 
not hold my political opinions covertly. I voted 
for your opponent. 

President. Then you must vacate this office. 

Clerk. If you can show that I have not per- 
formed my duties properly, or that I have neg- 
lected them for politics or for any other reason, 
I am willing to go. 

President. I have not looked into that ; it is 
immaterial, any way. I want your place for 
some one else. 

Clerk. For one of your partisan " workers," 
perhaps, whose qualifications you have also not 
looked into "i 

President. Possibly. 

Clerk. By what right do you proscribe me, 
then } You are merely a trustee ; these offices 
do not belong to you. 

President. You are the victim of an illusion. 



CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 1 65 

These offices do belong to me. They are my 
personal patronage and plunder, to do with 
whatsoever I will. If you refuse to resign, I 
will remove you. 

Clerk. Very well ; I will yield the place as I 
would my purse to a highwayman who puts a 
pistol to my head. Nevertheless, I denounce 
your action as an outrage upon my rights as an 
American citizen. 

If this conversation does not often take place 
actually as reported, its substance is at least 
tacitly understood. Generally the clerk stifles 
his protest and resigns, quietly submitting to a 
system that is an heritage of barbarism. Pro- 
scription of minor office-holders on account of 
political opinion is as completely indefensible 
as proscription on account of religious belief. 
It has no proper place in the United States. 
It is an anachronism, and belongs to the age 
of the crusades against the Catholics and the 
Jews. 



1 66 CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

III. 

" Civil service reform is an English importa- 
tion, upon which, unfortunately, there is no 
tariff. We broke with England and with her 
monarchical institutions a century ago, and set 
up a government of our own, — a democratic 
government. It supplies our needs, and stands 
as an example to mankind. Servile imitation 
of foreign polities is unworthy of our pride of 
race or nation." 

Anglophobia is in the American blood. A 
common law, language, literature, and religion 
do not of necessity constitute the ties of senti- 
ment. Although the American people are the 
heirs of all the ages, they do not like to be re- 
minded of their obligations, nor to acknowledge 
an ancestry. They will not claim kinship even 
with Shakespeare. To them their history knows 
no perspective ; in the discovery of a new and 
virgin world was the beginning of things. Eng- 
land is the traditional enemy, and all the pretty 
speeches made over London dinner-tables do 
not alter this fact in the least. This prejudice 
seems to be enduring, and any appeal made to 
it by politicians is generally successful. 



CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 1 6/ 

Happily, in the present case, the retort is 
complete. The spoils system, with the stamp of 
feudalism upon it, was imported into this coun- 
try from England, where it had obtained in the 
modern form for one hundred and forty years. 
It pervaded all departments of the English 
state, the army, the navy, and the church, as 
well as the civil service, attaining 3. growth 
which it has never known here. Offices were 
openly bought and sold, the purchaser acquiring 
a proprietary interest therein. Rotten boroughs 
were exposed for sale in the market, and mem- 
bers of Parliament were bribed to the. support 
of the crown by sinecures, pensions, and money. 
At the time our government was founded, the 
spoils system was flourishing luxuriantly in 
England, and George III. found it a most ser- 
viceable instrument in enforcing his policy of 
persecution against the thirteen colonies. It is 
a pity that those gentlemen who claim the 
spoils system as peculiarly " American " should 
have forgotten this. It embarrasses their argu- 
ment. Per contra^ the merit system is a demo- 
cratic institution, and its practical application 
to our civil service was coeval with the begin- 



1 68 CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

ning of our government. That England should 
have been before us in embodying it in the 
form of law proves nothing more than the im- 
mense progress which has been made in that 
country toward popular institutions. 



IV. 

"The executive power of Great Britain is 
hereditary, and changes only at the death of the 
monarch. The administration, however, changes 
at will, and may change every week. There- 
fore, the idea of life tenure for executive officers 
is consistent with an executive for life. There- 
fore, an official class of lifelong tenure is con- 
sistent with monarchical and aristocratic gov- 
ernment, which is peculiarly a government of 
classes. But it is not consistent with a dem- 
ocratic government and a short-lived executive 
where no class is recognized by law and all men 
are equal." ^ 

It happens, unfortunately for the consistency 
of this argument, that in England, under the 
modern system of parliamentary government, 

1 Senator Vance, Cong. Rec, vol. xvii. Part III. p. 2949. 



CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 169 

the administration is the executive. The execu- 
tive powers of the crown are obsolete, having 
passed to the prime minister and his cabinet. 
But these officials " change at will ; " they " may 
change every week." Consequently, tenure on 
good behavior — miscalled Hfe tenure — is con- 
sistent with democratic government and a short- 
lived executive. If civil service reform is not 
adapted to the United States, where the Presi- 
dent holds for four years, a fortiori, it is not 
adapted to England, where the tenure of the 
premier — the real executive — is the shortest 
and most precarious imaginable. Indeed, what 
we call civil service reform is the very life 
of parliamentary government. If, with every 
change of the ministry, a " clean sweep " of the 
offices should be made, the English civil service 
would soon be in a state of anarchy. Under 
such a system, rapid alternation in party control 
would totally disorganize the administrative ma- 
chinery of the government, and would be a per- 
petual threat against the existence of the empire 
itself, — a thing of course not to be tolerated. 
The situation in England was logically reducible 
to this : either the spoils system must be abol- 



I/O CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

ished, or some one party must be continued in 
power indefinitely, which would mean the de- 
struction of popular government. There could 
be no hesitation in choosing. The new demo- 
cracy achieved a victory over feudalistic privi- 
lege that was complete and final. 

Even apart from any political principle, the 
reform has vindicated itself. When the admin- 
istrative departments ceased to be asylums for 
decayed gentry, and were thrown open to public 
competition, there was an improvement in the 
morale and efficiency of the service. Reorgani- 
zation upon the basis of the merit system was 
extended even to India, where the duties of 
officials are of a most delicate and complicated 
character, involving, as they do, tactful relations 
with and control over two hundred millions of 
aliens. 

But it has come to pass that civil service re- 
form, which was denounced in England as 
** democratic," is opposed in the United States 
as representing exactly the opposite tendencies. 
*' Aristocracy," ** bureaucracy," and "insolence 
of office " are expressions as familiar as they are 
misleading. They deserve a brief consideration. 



CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 171 

Aristocracy means the permanent exaltation 
of a few individual names. It implies great 
social dignity and distinction, and generally is 
based upon an hereditary succession of title and 
land. An aristocracy of department clerks and 
mail-carriers is an absurdity. However worthy 
such persons may be, they will have no more 
social distinction than clerks in business houses, 
whose tenure is the same as theirs. They pos- 
sess neither title nor wealth, and are condemned 
to a routine of labor. The effect of service in 
a great government machine is to sink individ- 
uality, not to exalt it. The tens of thousands 
of school-teachers who are in the pay of every 
State do not constitute an aristocracy. In fact, 
they are rarely in the public view, and this for 
the reason that they are not *' in politics." For- 
tunately, the spoils system has not been applied 
to our public schools. If, however, it were the 
practice to dismiss all the Republican school- 
teachers whenever a Democratic governor 
should be elected, and vice versa, without doubt 
we should be feeUngly assured that any other 
tenure would seriously imperil our institutions. 
Bureaucracy is another chimera. It cannot 



1/2 CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

exist where the heads of administration are con- 
stantly changing, where admission to the civil 
service is open to all, and where the removal of 
the unfit servant is expeditious and easy. 

Insolence of office is an a priori argument. 
It has been pertinently said, in answer to it, 
that, at the time tenure on good behavior was 
superseded by Crawford's four-year law and by 
Jackson's regime, it was never urged by the 
innovators as a reason for the change that the 
manners of office-holders were contemptuous 
and overbearing. The objection is an after- 
thought. Of the insolence of bureaucracy and 
of the arrogance of aristocracy, the American 
people have had no experience under any official 
tenure, and are not likely to have. 

A civil service becomes formidable to the lib- 
erties of a people only when it seeks to perpet- 
uate itself by interfering with elections. Inas- 
much as this purpose (to override the public will 
and to create a bureaucracy) is the very vice of 
the American spoils system, speculation as to 
what may be, under civil service reform, can be 
profitably postponed to an observation of what is. 

The countless minor offices of the United 



CIVIL SERVICE RRFORM. I 73 

States are filled by a distinct class known as 
"professional politicians." These men live by 
politics, receiving place as reward for political 
work. Their control of public office is monopo- 
listic. Mr. Bryce estimates their number at two 
hundred thousand, but this is an underesti- 
mate. They constitute a guild, although they 
are not organized under formal articles of asso- 
ciation. With them office-getting (or keeping 
in office) is an industry, and the fees and emol- 
uments are accepted as payment for partisan 
services rather than for the exercise of official 
functions. The influence which the office- 
holders wield is altogether out of proportion to 
their numbers or to their intellectual attain- 
ments. But they possess this advantage over 
other classes, — they are unified and organized. 
They make the management of primaries and 
conventions the serious business of their lives, 
and acquire a skill and experience in " wire- 
pulling " which ordinary citizens cannot hope 
to cope with. The politics of the country is 
in the hands of these men. The people elect, 
but cannot nominate, being reduced to a choice 
of candidates selected by the politicians of op- 



1/4 CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

posing parties. These politicians dictate nomi- 
nations, high and low, and afterwards foreclose 
a lien upon public place which they claim to 
have earned. All others, those who cannot show 
a certificate of this character, are excluded. The 
spoils system has been compared with a fairly 
conducted lottery, in which every one has an 
equal chance. But the analogy is loose. In all 
lotteries the prizes are limited to ticket-holders, 
and in the American political lottery the ticket- 
holders are few. The farmer, the shopkeeper, 
and the laborer generally have not the remotest 
chance of preferment, unless they can produce 
evidence of partisan work more or less technical 
or questionable. Of course the number who 
can offer such credentials is comparatively small. 
To begin with, all the members of the defeated 
political party (who, under our electoral system, 
constitute, as often as not, more than one half 
of the people) are rigidly debarred. Secondly, 
only that small contingent of the dominant 
party who have been of practical use to the can- 
didates in convention and elsewhere receive any 
consideration whatever. The idea, therefore, 
that the offices are in the hands of the people 



CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 1 75 

is the shallowest of delusions. They are sold 
to the few for a price which the many are un- 
willing and are unable to pay. It is needless to 
say that, in this barter and sale of public place, 
the proper transaction of government business 
is lost sight of. Competency does not appoint 
an applicant, and cannot save an incumbent. 
Other motives of a mercenary or selfish char- 
acter control in both cases. Office brokerage 
is a shameless and conspicuous fact, as the 
newspapers and the congressional debates daily 
attest. It is the great object of civil service 
reform to restore these offices to the people, 
and to overthrow the bastard aristocracy who 
have despoiled them. Those good citizens who 
are apprehensive of government by '^official 
caste " need not strain their eyes to the future. 
They should look about them. 

V. 

" The political disqualification of office-holders 
is an invasion of their rights as American 
citizens." 

Civil service reform, as embodied in the Pen- 



1/6 CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

dleton Act of 1883, does not deny to an office- 
♦ holder any rights which properly belong to him 
as a citizen of the United States ; on the con- 
trary, it restores to him those rights of which 
he has been deprived. It protects him against 
partisan discrimination by the appointing power ; 
it protects his salary from assessment by his 
official superiors ; it protects him against re- 
moval for refusing to render any political ser- 
vice. It restores to him the right to think for 
himself, and to register his opinion at the ballot- 
box, free from the espionage of the informer. 
In this wise the law protects him. But civil 
service reform, in its gross and scope, within the 
statute and without, looks to the protection of 
the people also. There are certain things which 
a citizen as a place-holder may not do. He may 
not use his official influence to coerce the politi- 
cal actions of his neighbor, to wit : he may not 
neglect the duties of his office to do a hench- 
man's work; he may not pack primaries, manip- 
ulate conventions, collect and disburse election 
funds, corrupt the ballot-box, or tamper with the 
returns. Some of these things are forbidden 
by the federal and state criminal law ; others 



CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. ijy 

not. But whether or not, any and all of them 
are grave breaches of his duty, both as a citizen 
and as an office-holder. Yet these are the 
things which, in varying kind and degree, many 
officials notoriously are doing. Is it necessary 
to characterize such partisan activity as a mon- 
strous evil in a country where the triumph of 
right is a question of majority, or to justify the 
executive orders which have been issued to sup- 
press it .? 

In England, more than a century ago, the in- 
terference of office-holders in elections assumed 
such proportions that the whole body of subor- 
dinates in the executive department were for- 
bidden by law to vote for members of Parliament. 
In 1868, after the introduction of the merit 
system, this law was repealed, as being an un- 
necessary restriction. If a man procures an 
appointment on his deserts, and not through 
political influence, the obligations of appointee 
to patron do not exist, and the temptation to 
indulge in corrupt election practices disappears. 
The American doctrine of the relation of the 
office-holder to the body politic was set forth 
(albeit little to the immediate purpose) by 



178 CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

President Cleveland in an executive order issued 
July 14, 1886. In it he said : — 

" Individual interest and activity in political 
affairs are by no means condemned. Office- 
holders are neither disfranchised nor forbidden 
the exercise of political privileges, but their 
privileges are not enlarged, nor is their duty to 
party increased to pernicious activity, by office- 
holding. A just discrimination in this regard 
between the things a citizen may properly do 
and the purposes for which a public office should 
not be used is easy, in the light of a correct 
appreciation of the relation between the people 
and those intrusted with official place, and the 
consideration of the necessity, under our form 
of government, of political action free from offi- 
cial coercion." 

VI. 

" Is a competitive examination the best or any 
test for official competency or efficiency t May 
not a man be eminently competent for official 
preferment, and not at all competent for a com- 
petitive examination ? " ^ 

1 Senator Call, Cong. Rec, vol. xiv. Part I. p. 498. 



CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 1/9 

The system of competitive examination may 
not be perfectly adapted to ascertaining the 
comparative fitness of candidates for place ; but 
it is the best that has been suggested, and it is 
infinitely better than a system in which fitness 
is scarcely considered at all. 

It accomplishes, within the sphere to which it 
has been limited, the chief object of civil service 
reform, namely, the removal of the ministerial 
offices from the domain of partisan politics. It 
tends also to increase the efficiency and to de- 
crease the cost of the civil service, — an impor- 
tant though secondary consideration. There are 
some kinds of officers who cannot well be chosen 
by competition : the fourth-class postmasters, 
for instance, who live in sparsely settled dis- 
tricts, and who may be appointed by one of sev- 
eral feasible plans that have been suggested, 
and the higher grade of officers, such as chiefs 
of bureaus, whose competency would be better 
assured if they should obtain their positions by 
promotion, based upon worth, fidelity, and long 
experience. As to the intermediate officers, the 
system of competitive examination works satis- 
factorily. The official duties are clearly defined. 



\ 



l80 CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

and it is an easy matter to test the qualifications 
of applicants. If it be urged that business men 
do not select their employees by this method, it 
may be replied that they always make searching 
verbal inquiries into the capacity of applicants, 
and that, in some instances, where large num- 
bers of men are employed, rigid tests have 
been adopted. In fact, competition, in some 
form, is the unwritten law of the commercial 
world, it being a needful guarantee of the best 
service. 

It is, of course, possible that a man may be 
** eminently competent for official preferment, 
and not at all competent for a competitive ex- 
amination ; " but the chances are greatly against 
it, if the examination be " practical," as the law 
says it shall be. The civil service commission 
have performed their duty in this matter judi- 
ciously. That part of the examination which is 
intended to test the general fitness of applicants 
will not greatly tax the mental resources of any 
one possessing a common school education, un- 
less expert services are required. The standard 
set is low rather than high. Sir G. O. Trevel- 
yan says that the opening of the EngHsh civil 



CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. l8l 

and military services to competition, in its influ- 
ence upon national education, was equivalent to 
a hundred thousand scholarships and exhibitions 
of the most valuable kind. Whatever may be 
the influence of the system of federal examina- 
tions upon the education of the American people, 
there cannot be two opinions as to the effect of 
that system upon the national character. It is 
needless to point out that a public contest of 
merit, into which any one may enter without 
fear or solicitation, induces high endeavor, and 
conserves manhood. On the other hand, it is 
equally patent that where oflices go by favor, 
thrift follows fawning. Women seeking an 
honest career are reduced to importuning, may- 
hap subjected to insult ; young men are trans- 
formed into mendicants and sycophants ; and 
the position of all applicants does not differ ma- 
terially from that of the Elizabethan courtier, 
whose ignominy Spenser, in travail of spirit, has 
described so vividly : — 

"Full little knowest thou, that hast not tride, 
What hell it is in suing long to bide : 
To loose good days, that might be better spent ; 
To waste long nights in pensive discontent ; 



1 82 CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow ; 
To feed on hope, to pine with feare and sorrow ; 
To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares ; 
To eate thy heart through comfortlesse dispaires ; 
To fawne, to crouche, to wait, to ride, to ronne, 
To spend, to give, to want, to be undonne." 

VII. 

"This is the civil service that he [Jefferson] 
taught us, sir, — ' Is the man honest ? Is he 
capable?' These were the only requirements. 
If, then, he is a man who is deserving, his em- 
ployer should be the sole judge of it. When I 
make application for admission as an employee 
in one of the departments here, the head of the 
department is the man to inquire into my qual- 
ifications and honesty."^ 

That a representative of Tammany Hall 
should arise in the national Congress and 
gravely inveigh against the merit system on the 
ground that it does not embody the Jeffersonian 
requirements of honesty and capacity, is a spec- 
tacle calculated to excite pensive reflections 
upon the decadence of American humor. 

1 General Spinola, Proceedings of the House of Representa- 
tives, December 19, 1888. 



CIVIL SERVICE REFORM, 1 83 

That '^ancient and powerful organization" 
migHt have informed itself that the Pendleton 
Ac't does not prevent the "head of a depart- 
ment " from looking into " the qualifications and 
honesty" of an applicant. The appointive 
power is not transferred by that measure. No 
one pretends that the secretary of a great de- 
partment has the time personally to test the 
fitness, by examination or otherwise, of those 
applying for the numerous clerkships under his 
control."" Under any system this duty must be 
delegated. The civil service commission is a 
convenience, simply, and is created as a guaran- 
tee of fair play. It does not appoint ; it merely 
certifies to the result of the public competitive 
examinations held under its auspices. Its func- 
tions are ministerial, and its inquiries may be 
treated as preliminary. It is true that the head 
of the department cannot go outside the list 
of eligibles in making appointments; but it is 
true also that the whole public is invited to the 

competition, and thus has the opportunity to 

range itself within those lists. 

If heads of departments, or rather chiefs of 

bureaus, ought to choose their own subordinates, 



1 84 CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

then the objector quoted above has furnished an 
excellent reason why the spoils system, which 
he advocates, should be abolished. An unwrit- 
ten law governing that system robs the chief of 
bureau of all discretion in the matter of appoint- 
ments. Congressmen dictate to him whom he 
shall employ. 

The questions : Is the applicant honest t Is 
he capable .? are not controlling. Practically, 
the chief is precluded from discriminating in- 
quiry ; he must take what the Congressman sets 
before him. Nor is this all. He cannot dis- 
charge an unruly or inefficient employee without 
endangering his own head. Numerous instances 
might be quoted to show that clerks who have 
been dismissed by the chief for the good of the 
service have been restored by him under the 
pains and penalties of congressional insistence. 

A system which permits outsiders thus to 
interfere in the conduct of the departments, and 
which transforms the civil service into a bank- 
rupt court for the liquidatibn of political debt, 
can hardly be extolled as promotive of good ad- 
ministration. Much less are its defenders in a 
position to assail the merit system, which would 



CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 1 85 

appoint a chief of bureau by promotion, and 
which would secure to him such independence 
and discretion as are necessary to the proper 
performance of his duties. 



VIII. 

'"' The duties of all public officers are, or at 
least admit of being made, so plain and simple 
that men of intelligence may readily qualify 
themselves for their performance ; and I cannot 
but believe that more is lost by the long con- 
tinuance of men in office than is generally to be 
gained by their experience. I submit, therefore, 
to your consideration whether the efficiency of 
the government would not be promoted, and 
official industry and integrity better secured, by 
a general extension of the law which limits ap- 
pointments to four years." ^ 

President Jackson himself furnishes the best 
commentary upon his own text. Without wait- 
ing for Congress to act upon his recommenda- 
tion to extend the four-year law, he immedi- 

1 Andrew Jackson's first annual message to Congress, Decem- 
ber 8, 1829. 



1 86 CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

ately put his theory into practice by making 
removals wholesale, thus inaugurating the spoils 
system as we now know it. The effect was 
not at all what the public had been led to 
expect by the words of the annual message. 
Webster said, in a speech,^ that during the first 
three years of the new administration (1829-32) 
more nominations had been '' rejected [by the 
Senate] on the ground of unfitness than in all 
the preceding years of the government ; and 
those nominations, you know, sir, could not have 
been rejected but by votes of the President's 
own friends." Nor did those persons who suc- 
ceeded in passing the ordeal of senatorial con- 
firmation give character to the service. The 
good name of the country was scandalized by 
great frauds. The loss which occurred in the 
handUng of government funds during the eight 
years of Jackson's rule averaged ^7.52 per thou- 
sand, an increase of $3.13 over that of his pre- 
decessor, John Quincy Adams. During the 
administration of Van Buren, — that perfect 
exponent of the spoils system and protege of 
Jackson, — the deficits reached the great sum of 

1 Delivered at Worcester, Mass., October 12, 1832. 



CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 1 87 

^11.72 per thousand, the high-water mark of in- 
efficiency and corruption in the official history of 
the United States. This marked deterioration 
of the pubHc service may be easily explained. 
Incumbents had been removed for political rea- 
sons, and not for purposes of administrative re- 
form. Little wonder, then, that President Jack- 
son should advocate the vacation of office by 
law, and thus save himself and his successors 
the odium of those evils which follow in the train 
of an arbitrary and indiscriminate proscription 
of place-holders. 

IX. 

" Rotation in office, change, is an absolute ne- 
cessity. Our whole system abhors perpetuity. 
Rotation and change, the frequent examination 
of the servant's accounts, and the frequent re- 
moval of the servant himself, is an essential 
element to secure the perpetuity of free insti- 
tutions." ^ 

An examination of the servant's accounts 
should not wait upon removal, and the servant 
himself should not be removed unless there is 

1 Senator Williams, Cong. Rec, vol. xiv. Part I. p. 505. 



1 88 CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

cause for it. " Change for the sake of change " 
is unsound as a political principle and impracti- 
cable as a business method. It would wreck any 
government or railroad that adopted it. In es- 
sence it is a pseudo-socialism. The theory that 
the citizen owes a duty to the state is supplanted 
by the doctrine that the state owes a place to 
the citizen ; that government is a device for 
the support of its subjects ; and that every man 
should be maintained in some mysterious and 
circuitous manner by every other man. This 
opens an alluring vista of possibilities. If every 
one ** has a right to an office ; " if incumbents 
should be removed simply because they have 
been in "long enough;" if official life is a 
" merry-go-round," it follows duly that rotation 
must successively induct into place every adult 
in the United States, for a period of time to 
be ascertained only by a nice calculation in 
the rule of three. Should it be objected that 
rotation is not rotatory, — that is, that it does 
not include all, — then the doctrine lacks even 
the apology of a common benefit, and becomes 
merely an alimentary provision for a few hungry 
office-seekers. As such it will not commend 



CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 1 89 

itself to the popular judgment. The people are 
not interested in the fortunes of itinerant place- 
hunters. They are interested, however, in hav- 
ing the business of the government — that is, 
the business of themselves — well done. But 
to refuse to recognize merit by promotion ; to 
remove all officers, the faithful and the unfaith- 
ful, the efficient and the inefficient, the honest 
and the dishonest, indifferently, is to put a pre- 
mium upon sloth, bungling, and peculation. In 
these days of sharp competition, commercial 
houses do not conduct their business so, and 
would not if they could. To employ a man with 
scant regard to his fitness, and to discharge him 
despite his skill, trustworthiness, and experience, 
would be to court ruin and to build up rival con- 
cerns. But it may be urged that the govern- 
ment is a monopoly, and can afford to ignore 
the economies ; that the American people are 
rich, dislike cheese-paring, and are fond of " mu- 
nificent public expenditure." Is the art of ad- 
ministration beneath the dignity of an intelligent 
people t It should be their pride. The United 
States is the most extravagant of civilized gov- 
ernments. What it wastes would enrich any 



I go CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

third-class power. States and municipalities 
are groaning under debts recklessly incurred. 
In some cases, where the burdens have been too 
heavy to be borne, or where the public con- 
science has been weak, repudiation has left its 
indelible stain. Princely domains have been 
voted to railroads by federal and state legisla- 
tures. Tens of millions of dollars have been 
sunk in the improvement of unused water-ways, 
in half-finished canals, and in badly made roads. 
The enormous fees and salaries paid in many 
States to county officers have been a prolific 
source of office jobbery and of corrupt elections, 
and, it may be remarked in passing, afford a 
field for civil service reform which as yet is 
scarcely explored. As to municipal government, 
its name is a byword and a hissing. Valuable 
franchises, which ought to yield a permanent 
public revenue, have been, and are being, con- 
stantly given away to corporations. Insecure 
public buildings, defective sewage systems, illy 
paved and illy lighted streets, leaky aqueducts, 
and impure water supplies commemorate in al- 
most every city the carelessness of a free people 
and the unfitness of their servants. A computa- 



CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 19I 

tion of the cost of government in this country, 
made by some careful statistician, would be an 
interesting object lesson to the taxpayer. That 
much-exploited individual is awakening at last 
to the fact that something is wrong. He is 
beginning to doubt whether the " hustler " or 
the ** worker " is the ideal administrative officer. 
To choose a city civil engineer because he is a 
** good fellow," and to appoint an architect of 
federal buildings because he is a cousin of the 
President's step-aunt, no longer seems to him 
to be a wholly rational proceeding. The idea 
that every American is qualified, without pre- 
vious training or experience, to fill any office 
has proved to be an expensive delusion. The 
most incompetent men in the civil service of the 
United States are those who are appointed for 
short terms. About 3,500 of the higher-grade 
officers are so selected by the President and the 
Senate, but the business of the places them- 
selves is in the hands of subordinates, upon 
whom the superior is helplessly dependent. As 
a rule, the presidential postmaster knows no- 
thing of the workings of his office. Although 
he is the highest in rank, he becomes, by force 



192 CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

of circumstances, the pupil of the lowest. He 
learns his duties at the expense of the gov- 
ernment, and, as often as not, is removed at 
the very time he begins to be serviceable. The 
same is also true of other officers, including the 
members of the cabinet. The case of the last 
named, however, is exceptional. These officials 
are quasi-legislative, as well as administrative. 
As the political advisers of the President, and 
indirectly of Congress, and as the exponents of 
a party or national policy, they should be re- 
movable at pleasure. If the effect of this com- 
mingling of duties is not always salutary, it fur- 
nishes sometimes an agreeable diversion to the 
disinterested spectator. The facility with which 
members of the cabinet are shifted from one de- 
partment to another, during the same adminis- 
tration, indicates either great versatility in the 
American administrative officer, or (more prob- 
ably) a profound and impartial ignorance that is 
not less impressive. At the best, the technical 
knowledge possessed by the heads of depart- 
ments is superficial, and the rapidity of cabinet 
changes merely emphasizes the need for expe- 
rienced subordinates. Indeed, experience, of 



CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 1 93 

which duration in office is generally the measure, 
is absolutely indispensable. 

But the advocates of rotation cite the many 
excellences of the civil administration of the 
United States as proof of their theory. It dis- 
proves it. Parties have not alternated in the 
control of the government every four years, as 
the Constitution permits. They have had ex- 
tended leases of power, and, while many changes 
have been made in the personnel of the service, 
the body of the employees have been retained 
long enough to enable them to become familiar 
with their duties, and to administer their offices 
with economy and dispatch. Mr. Eaton, the 
American encyclopaedist of civil service reform, 
writing in 1884, said that "the average periods 
of service in the lower offices, of late, at least, 
have been two or three times four years, and 
have been the longest where administration has 
been best and politics least partisan and corrupt. 
The average time of service of the more than 
42,000 postmasters, whose terms are not fixed 
by law, has probably been about ten years, at 
least, if we exclude post-offices established 
within that period." ^ 

1 Lalor's Cyclopcedia, vol. iii. p. 904. 



194 CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

Here, then, we are face to face with the diffi- 
culty (before stated) which confronted England, 
namely : to obtain good government, either the 
spoils system must be abolished, or some one 
party must be continued in power indefinitely. 
*' Rotation " is already discredited in business 
communities. It exists in theory only because 
it is infrequent in practice. A few successive 
trials of it will be a liberal education to all 
persons concerned. 

But it is urged, with some patriotic fervor, 
that "our system abhors perpetuity;" that ro- 
tation is a fundamental principle of democracy ; 
and that it is essential to the permanence of our 
institutions. 

Whether a government, established for the 
common benefit of the whole people, " abhors " 
the " perpetuity " of anything that helps to se- 
cure that end is a question which perhaps even 
the wayfaring man might answer, without invok- 
ing the aid of the casuist. 

The government of the United States was 
formed as a protest against tyranny ; that is, 
against the rule of unfit and irresponsible men. 
The fitness and responsibility of rulers were 



CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 195 

among the germinal ideas of the Constitution. 
Hereditary kingships and hereditary houses of 
legislation were abolished by that instrument. 
Merit, and not accident of birth, was to be the 
test of official preferment. Civil service reform 
embodies this ideal. It says that those officers 
of the executive department whose duties, being 
purely administrative and not legislative, are 
the same, whatever party is in power, shall be 
appointed from the whole people, solely on ac- 
count of fitness ; that they shall not be secured 
in place for any fixed term, be it short or long ; 
and that their tenure shall depend upon their 
good behavior and efficiency. Obviously, this 
tenure, which means the instant decapitation of 
the unfit servant, is a very different thing from 
life tenure, which means a vested interest in 
office. 

Several facts prove conclusively that the 
founders of the republic took this view of the 
matter. In the first place, they fixed the term 
of no officer in the executive department except 
that of the President and the Vice-President. 
Secondly, they provided by express words in 
the Constitution that the judges of the Supreme 



196 CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

Court and the inferior courts should hold their 
offices during good behavior. Thirdly, they 
applied this system to the civil administration 
at the very beginning of the government. The 
allegation, then, that a tenure of this character, 
which was an established usage for forty years, 
is radical, revolutionary, and subversive of " our 
system " may be leniently ascribed to the inac- 
curate tendencies of the florid and rhetorical 
mind. 

Strange as it may appear to earnest but mis- 
guided vociferants, there has been no statutory 
change in the tenure of the great majority of 
inferior officers in the civil branch of the ex- 
ecutive department. Custom, it is true, has 
wrought a decided change in that it has substi- 
tuted a tenure of favoritism and partisanship ; 
but no legal barrier to continuous service has 
been erected. An appointee under the spoils 
system may grow gray in the government ser- 
vice, provided always that he can gain and retain 
the influence of some potent politician. Probably 
the advocates of rotation will not greatly object 
to this, if the incumbent belongs to " their side." 
Indeed, it is painful, as a commentary upon the 



CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 1 97 

perishable nature of political convictions, to ob- 
serve how speedily the party in power becomes 
reconciled to that perpetuity in office which 
erstwhile was so abhorrent. It leaves it to the 
party which is out of power — those who are 
unbidden to the feast — to become "aghast" at 
the enormity of the thing. Did not the domi- 
nant party thus acquiesce periodically in a stable 
holding, the doctrine of rotation would have 
vanished in disgrace long since. 

As far back as 1835, M^- Calhoun pointed out 
the distinction which is necessary to a proper 
understanding of the rotation theory. In advo- 
cating the repeal of the four-year law, with the 
ablest men of the Senate, including Webster, 
Clay, Benton, and others, he said : — 

" I will not undertake to inquire now whether the 
principle of rotation, as applied to the ordinary min- 
isterial officers of a government, may not be favora- 
ble to popular and free institutions, when such officers 
are chosen by the people themselves. It certainly 
would have a tendency to cause those who desire 
office, when the choice is in the people, to seek their 
favor ; but certain it is, that in a Government where 
the Chief Magistrate has the filling of vacancies, in- 



198 CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

Stead of the people, there will be an opposite ten- 
dency, — to court the favor of him who has the 
disposal of offices, — and this for the very reason 
that when the choice is in the people their favor is 
courted. If the latter has a popular tendency, it 
is no less certain that the former must have a 
contrary one." ^ 

If this reasoning suggests to zealous advocates 
of rotation the propriety of making the ministe- 
rial offices of the executive department elective, 
and thereby amenable to the people, another 
quotation — one from the publicist, John Stuart 
Mill — may be permitted : — 

" A most important principle of good government 
in a popular constitution is that no executive func- 
tionaries should be appointed by popular election, 
neither by the votes of the people themselves nor by 
those of their representatives. The entire business 
of government is skilled employment ; the qualifica- 
tions for the discharge of it are of that special and 
professional kind which cannot be properly judged 
of except by persons who have themselves some 
share of those qualifications, or some practical expe- 
rience of them. The business of finding the fittest 

1 Works, vol^ii. pp. 445, 446. 



CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 1 99 

persons to fill public employment — not merely se- 
lecting the best who offer, but looking out for the 
absolutely best, and taking note of all fit persons 
who are met with, that they may be found when 
wanted — is very laborious, and requires a delicate 
as well as highly conscientious discernment ; and as 
there is no public duty which is in general so badly 
performed, so there is none for which it is of greater 
importance to enforce the utmost practicable amount 
of personal responsibility, by imposing it as a spe- 
cial obligation on high functionaries in the several 
departments. All subordinate public officers who 
are not appointed by some mode of public compe- 
tition should be selected on the direct responsibility 
of the minister under whom they serve." ^ 

If, to suppose a case, the 57,000 postmasters 
in the United States were elected by the people, 
what would be the efficiency of the Post-Office 
Department ? Instead of a coordinated whole, 
regulated by and responsible to a single head, 
there would be a multitude of independent units 
— a debating society. The Postmaster-General, 
denuded of all authority, would be a figure-head, 
an adviser, not a commander. Even if the 

1 Rep. Gov., pp. 268, 269. 



200 CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

power of removal were secured to him, he could 
not exercise it without affronting the judgment 
of the particular constituency that elected the 
displaced officer. Appeals from his decisions 
to the electoral bodies would be frequent, and 
would result in endless confusion. Under such 
circumstances an administrative system would 
be impossible. Blame for maladministration 
could not be fixed, and responsibility is vital to 
good government. " As a general rule, every 
executive function, whether superior or subor- 
dinate, should be the appointed duty of some 
given individual. It should be apparent to all 
the world who did everything, and through 
whose default anything was left undone. Re- 
sponsibility is null when nobody knows who is 
responsible ; nor, even when real, can it be 
divided without being weakened." ^ 

Municipalities are beginning to lay this lesson 
to heart. Government by boards of aldermen 
and by councils, whose members are answerable, 
not to the whole city, but to separate districts, 
is a famous contrivance for ill doing and not do- 
ing. For these joint feasors there is no common 

1 Rep. Gov.., p. 262. 



CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 201 

court. But if authority were fused, it would be 
easier to mete out punishment. A mayor 
elected by the whole community, and endowed 
with the power of appointing boards of public 
works, would receive the full meed of praise or 
blame. Charged with malfeasance, he could 
not, Adam-like, lay it on another. Solely re- 
sponsible, he would present a conspicuous figure 
for public sacrifice. Complexity is the weakness 
of popular government ; simplicity is its genius. 
The mass move slowly, and it is the height of 
unwisdom to distract their attention from one 
to many by diffusing responsibility. This rea- 
soning applies to all administrative government, 
whether local or national. It tells strongly 
against the four-year law, which divides between 
the President and the Senate the responsibility 
of appointing the higher administrative officers 
of the United States. This law, which is the 
exemplar of rotation, increases the power of the 
President by compelling a new appointment 
every four years. It also decreases his respon- 
sibility. To use the words of Webster, ''the 
law itself vacates the office, and gives the means 
of rewardinof a friend without the exercise of the 



202 CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

power of removal at all."^ If the friend thus 
appointed is incompetent, unfaithful, or dis- 
honest, the President can plead, in extenuation, 
that the Senate cooperated with him in the se- 
lection of the officer. But the Senators them- 
selves escape individual censure, because all 
confirmations occur in secret session. It was 
said in defense of this cumbrous method of 
choice that the Senate, in acting upon a nomina- 
tion by the President, would look solely to the 
fitness of the candidate, and that ** its advice 
and consent " would be disinterested. Experi- 
ence refutes this. In many instances, nomina- 
tions are ratified, not because the nominees are 
fit, but because their names have been sug- 
gested by the very Senators who pass upon 
them. In other instances, the power of " sena- 
torial courtesy " is invoked, and nominations are 
rejected because the nominees are personally 
objectionable to the Senators of some particular 
State. Division of responsibility here means 
division of spoil. 

The first four-year law (passed in 1820) was 

1 The Appointing and Removing Power, U. S. Senate, Feb- 
ruary 16, 1835. 



CIVIL SERVICE REFORM, 203 

the herald of the patronage system. " The bill 
was retroactive, and it made official terms expire 
upon the eve of the presidential election." It 
was drawn by Mr. Crawford, who expected to 
be, and was, a candidate for the presidency in 
1824. 

** The avowed reason, or rather the apology, 
for the new policy was that it would remove un- 
worthy officers ; the speciousness of which ap- 
pears in the facts that the tenures of all in office, 
worthy and unworthy alike, were, without in- 
quiry, severed absolutely; and nothing but offi- 
cial pleasure was to protect the most meritori- 
ous in the future. There was no showing of de- 
linquencies ; no charge that the President could 
not or would not remove unworthy officials ; not 
a word of discussion, not a record of votes, on 
this revolutionary bill ! " ^ 

In the lapse of time the provisions of the bill 
were extended. With the downfall of the con- 
gressional caucus the initiative in the nomina- 
tion of Presidents passed to the country at large. 
Thus it happened that "workers" were needed 
in every quarter to advance the interests of can- 

1 D. B. Eaton, Lalor's Cyclopcedia, vol. iii. p. 900. 



204 CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

didates, and these men must be paid. But how ? 
To abolish tenure on good behavior and to legis- 
late incumbents out of office every four years 
was an easy and admirable expedient. This was 
done in the case of postmasters drawing a salary 
of a thousand dollars per annum, or more, and 
of some others, and the law now covers nearly 
all the high-salaried officials on the civil list. 
The Pendleton Act affects only their subordi- 
nates ; and our administrative system to-day 
presents the anomaly of filling certain inferior 
offices by the test of merit, and of jobbing out 
the superior offices as political rewards. If the 
civil service act is to be honestly enforced, the 
four-year law must be repealed. Postmasters, 
collectors, heads of divisions, and bureaus, who 
are themselves the creatures of favoritism, and 
who are daily beset by " workers " clamoring 
for office, cannot be expected to look kindly 
upon a law which is a reproach to their own 
existence, and which denies to them the power 
to pay the men who have made them what they 
are. There is another consideration : the high- 
est positions demand the largest capacity and 
the longest experience. But the four-year law 



CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 205 

makes the supply smallest where the demand is 
greatest. Again, to subject subordinates to 
ignorant and incapable superiors is to demoral- 
ize the service. The lower should look upward, 
not the higher downward. 

It may be admitted that there is a deep-rooted 
popular objection to the repeal of the four-year 
law, and the reason is plain. Federal offices 
have been used so long as party spoils, and have 
been so much the subject of contention, that 
the people have come to regard them as not less 
important than legislative offices, and to look 
with as grave distrust upon long tenure in the 
one as in the other. This mistake is not un- 
natural. These offices are filled by prominent 
politicians, who, by reason of their election 
work, have become obnoxious to many of the 
community. To keep such factious persons in 
place indefinitely seems to the public the 
greatest kind of an evil. But the repeal of 
the four-year law will not perpetuate this evil ; 
it will abolish it. It will bring into office a dif- 
ferent class of men, who will be little in the 
public eye, and whose energies will be devoted 
to the public, and not to party interests. 



206 CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 

So much for the doctrine of rotation, seriously 
and tenderly considered. Stripped of its pre- 
tentious and misleading verbiage, it means, not 
the purification of the civil service, but the dis- 
placement of one horde of office-seekers by an- 
other. It is the cry of foray, not the watch- 
word of reform. It is an excuse, not a reason. 
It is the sign and symbol of a predatory raid, 
the rallying banner of landless resolutes en- 
listed to an enterprise that hath a stomach in 
it. Looked at in any way, rotation is a per- 
petually recurring menace to the stability of 
our government. It is the prop of a falling 
party, and the instrument of fraud. It is a con- 
stant temptation to politicians to use public 
salaries as a fund with which to pay private 
debts, thus compelling the people to furnish 
the means for their own corruption and to 
defeat their own will. It wrecks the lives of 
tens of thousands of young men by offering, as 
a bait to cupidity, high wages which outbid the 
market. It makes idle expectants of the indus- 
trious, starves the few it feeds, and lures the 
mass to vagrancy. It subverts the true ideal of 
office, transforming public servants into private 



CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. 20/ 

henchmen, and partisans into camp followers. 
It degrades skilled labor, and makes the govern- 
ment an almshouse. It breeds parasites, mar- 
kets citizenship, and suborns public opinion. 
To sum up, it makes of administration a chaos, 
of politics a trade, and of principle an interest. 
Rotation is not an " essential element to secure 
the perpetuity of free institutions." 






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